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Things of the Mind 



J. L. SPALDING 

33ist)op of Peoria 



A genuine interest in problems of education helps to keep us young, 
for it carries us back to our own springtime and to the company of chil- 
dren. It is also an evidence that we ourselves have not ceased to grow, 
and are therefore not yet old. 



v^in^^ 



CHICAGO 

A. C. McCLURG AND COMPANY 

1894 






Copyright 
By a. C. McClurg & Co. 

A. D. i8q4. 



CONTENTS. 



Chapter Page 

I. Views of Education 7 

II. Views of Education 40 

III. Views of Education 66 

IV. Professional Education 94 

V. Theories of Life and Education . . 128 

VI. Culture and Religion 173 

VII. Patriotism 220 




THINGS OF THE MIND, 



CHAPTER I. 

VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 

To be an interpreter and relater of the best and sagest 
things among mine own citizens. — Milton. 

WHETHER it be beautiful scenery, or 
noble monuments, or venerable ruins, 
or painting, or sculpture, or music, or books, 
or contact with life, things presented to us 
educate us only inasmuch as we react upon 
them. Lead the listless savage through all 
that is most worth seeing, knowing, admiring, 
and loving, and at the end he is what he was 
at the start. The general problem of educa- 
tion is how best to place instinct and passion 
under the control of reason and conscience, of 
higher motives and tastes, that men may learn 
to find their pleasure and their happiness in 
doing what brings health, knowledge, and 
virtue. The educator's aim is to create in- 



8 THINGS OF THE MIND, 

terest, for thus alone is it possible to awaken 
mind. How often it happens, where dulness 
and listlessness had prevailed, a new-comer 
brings joy and fresh thoughts. This the 
teacher should do ; when he appears, he should 
call forth a sense of glad expectancy, just as 
a true actor at once lifts a heavy scene into 
the region of active interest. He is wholly 
free from the pedant's vanity and conceit, and 
in his skill there is the play of life. Mechani- 
cal iteration is the radical fault in education. 
We pardon our instructors almost anything 
if only they be not tiresome. Better not to 
teach or preach than to weary. When the 
pupil's intercourse with the teacher opens to 
him glimpses into higher worlds, he is quick 
to believe all that is told him of heroes, saints, 
and sages. Sowers, reapers, and gardeners, 
hunters, fishermen, and the feeders of flocks 
are the best society for boys; they stimulate 
an observant interest in the things which are 
always around them, and touch the sources of 
pure delight in nature in her most beneficent 
and pleasant manifestations. To watch, when 
one is young, the sun with gradual wheel sink 
slowly from sight, or the stars, as one by one 
they break upon the view, or the birds when 
with gentle flutterings they settle to rest amid 
the leaves, or the full-fed cattle as they lie in 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 9 

wakeful dreams, or the young of animals dis- 
porting themselves upon the green, or the 
bees plying their task amid the flowers, or 
ants providing their hoard, or any of the thou- 
sand things nature offers so prodigally to our 
gaze, — is to drink at the purest and freshest 
fountain of knowledge, is to store the mind 
with thoughts and images which, as the years 
go on, remain with us fragrant and wholesome 
as a breath of air from life's fair dawn. To 
look on the fierce battles of bulls, of boars, 
and of cocks is to feel the might of courage 
and endurance. To see the little martens as 
they sally forth to attack the hawk is to learn 
what pluck and daring, what a union of several 
may accomplish. The great source of sym- 
pathy with mankind, as with nature, are those 
early recollections which bring back to us 
fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, and 
all the fair, fresh world which circled about 
our childhood. Read no book unless it in- 
terest thee. When thou readest, or speakest, 
or hearest, look steadfastly with the mind at 
the things the words symbolize. If there be 
question of mountains, let them loom before 
thee; if of the ocean, let its billows roll 
beneath thy eyes. This habit will give to thy 
voice even pliancy and meaning. The more 
sources of interest we have, the richer is our 



lO THINGS OF THE MIND. 

life. To hold any portion of truth in a vital 
way is better than to have its whole baggage 
stored merely in one's memory. The self- 
taught look at the world with their own eyes 
and think their own thoughts. Thy own mind 
is the first and final court of evidence, and 
what it receives it should receive on the 
authority of evidence or on the evidence of 
authority; in other words, it should accept 
only what it sees to be true, or has sufficient 
warrant for believing. The more cultivated 
a man is, the greater the number of things 
which interest him. Where others see nothing 
he finds a well-spring of fresh thoughts; he 
observes, and attends to what he observes; 
he receives much because he brings much; he 
discovers truth and beauty and goodness in 
things because he bears them within himself. 
His mind is a light which clothes what he 
contemplates in well-defined forms and rightly 
shaded colors; his heart is an alembic in 
which the fine spirit of love is distilled; his 
imagination, like a god, calls forth a living 
world from the waste and void abyss of matter. 
He who thinks for himself is rarely persuaded 
by another. Information and inspiration he 
gladly receives, but he forms his own judg- 
ment. Arguments and reasons which to the 
thoughtful sound like mockery satisfy the 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. II 

superficial and the ignorant. An enlightened 
mind sympathizes with the multitude as he 
sympathizes with children, not so much for 
what they are as for what it is possible to 
make of them. 

"To be a fool after the fashion," says Kant, 
"is better than to be a downright fool." 
Noble thoughts and pure loves inform the 
countenance, and give dignity and grace to 
one's whole bearing. A fair and luminous 
soul makes its body beautiful. Take up anew 
each day the task set thee, — to make thy- 
self more truly a rational, social, and moral 
being. 

Hasteless, but restless, O my soul, follow after the light 
That still gleams as brightly as the stars that follow the night. 

Man is not born, he is made by education, — 
by the education he receives and by the educa- 
tion he gives himself. Imagination rules our 
life. It creates the ideals by which we live ; 
from point to point it beckons us on to the 
unattained. Over vulgar reality it throws a 
mystic veil; it draws the charmed circle 
wherein move friendship, love, and freedom. 
It blows the trumpet of honor and fame; it 
leads the way to glorious death. 

Superficial minds are fond of dwelling upon 
the evils religion has wrought; but serious 



12 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

thinkers know that the ever open and inex- 
haustible fountain of faith, hope, and love, is 
belief in God, — or in gods, if you will. 

If men have fought and persecuted and died 
for their religion, it is because they have held 
it to be a priceless blessing. This breath from 
higher worlds, unseen but felt to be real, is 
to young unfolding souls what sunshine and 
rain are to the growing corn. 

When the vital current flows rich and 
healthful, as in the young, life is believed, 
without the remotest shadow of doubt, to be 
good; but this is largely unconscious life, and 
the question is, whether consciousness is a 
blessing, whether to see things as they are 
brings joy and peace. The problem therefore 
resolves itself into this, — whether, at the 
heart of being, behind, within, and above all, 
there is truth and love; in other words, whether 
the ultimate fact is conscious life. They who 
are unable to think that this is so must hold 
that to think is to be sad, whereas they who 
believe in God cannot but think that the 
misery of conscious existence is accidental. 
Theism is optimism, atheism is pessimism. 
If there were no God, ignorance would be 
bliss, and education a crime. Hope and love 
are the expression of faith in life's goodness. 
He alone is a true pessimist who neither hopes 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 1 3 

nor loves. The end of education is the forma- 
tion of character; character rests on the basis 
of morality; and morality, if it have life and 
vigor, is interfused with religion. True reli- 
gion is inseparable from morality, and morality 
from right life, and therefore from right edu- 
cation. Hence religion, morality, and educa- 
tion, are a trinity. "Religion," says Herbart, 
"will never hold the tranquil place in the 
depths of the heart which it ought to have, 
if its fundamental ideas are not among the 
earliest which belong to recollection, — if it is 
not bound up and blended with all that chang- 
ing life leaves behind in the centre of person- 
ality." As we should strive to teach ourselves 
to take delight in whatever is fair in nature, 
in whatever is true or beautiful in literature 
or art, so we should learn to find pleasure in 
whatever brings good to men, and first of all 
in the welfare and success of those around us, 
though they be our foes and rivals. A noble 
man feels that no human being, not even his 
enemy, is as happy as he would have him be, 
and thus he finds satisfaction in what only 
embitters and saddens mean and narrow souls. 
This enlightened good-will which enables us 
to have genuine sympathy with all men, is the 
very soul of the moral character which- it is 
the aim and end of education to form. Why 



14 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

do men choose an avocation? To gain a liveli- 
hood. But the better sort, whatever their 
special occupation, labor to fit themselves for 
life in the higher world of thought and love. 
Let every faculty be developed in the mild 
and wholesome air of religion. Good teachers 
feel they are educating themselves as well as 
their pupils, and when this belief is not found 
the power to educate is lacking. He who is 
led by the ideal of intellectual culture con- 
cerns himself little with mere questions of 
social order and political economy, for he feels 
that if he can but make reason prevail it will 
put right whatever may need ordering. They 
who are able to draw forth the mind and 
illumine the soul should be relieved from all 
other tasks. In our social gatherings we 
ascend from out the true self, to glide on the 
surface amid the forms and shows of life. 
Hence nothing deeply interesting is ever heard 
where men meet to eat and talk. Do what it 
is right thou shouldst do now; but strive 
ceaselessly that it may become possible for 
thee to do the work thou wast born to do. 

The craving for applause is as morbid as the 
craving for alcohol. He alone is strong who 
is self-sufficient, since he is what he is through 
communion with God and the world of truth. 
When the great man — poet, philosopher, states- 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 15 

man, orator, or captain — has gained recogni- 
tion, he becomes indifferent to the praise he 
once longed for. Happier is he who dies know- 
ing his own worth, himself unknown, "and 
what most merits fame in silence hid." Let 
the young be made to understand that the 
desire to appear, to be seen, to be noticed, to 
be talked of, springs from a crude and bar- 
barous nature. When we look to changes to 
be wrought in the social and religious world, 
it may be permitted to feel discouragement, 
but when there is question of upbuilding and 
transforming our own being we should be filled 
with a divine confidence, knowing that the 
aids to noble life, like the kingdom of God, lie 
within us. Be a man, not a partisan. " Great 
moral energy," says Herbart, "is the result of 
broad views and of whole unbroken masses of 
thought." Every secret, for those who can 
see, is an open secret. How any man achieved 
any godlike thing, any man may know. 

Thou mayst not be an artist who works in 
stone or on canvas, or who breathes harmo- 
nious numbers, but an artist thou shouldst 
become, in the ceaseless effort to fashion thy 
own life into the likeness of what is true, 
beautiful, and good. Though thou shouldst 
think all the world a stage, learn at least, like 
Augustus, to play well thy part. For a cen- 



1 6 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

tury now and more, the world resounds with 
much speech about the rights of man. His 
first and chief right is the right to grow, to 
unfold his being on many sides, and to bring 
himself into conscious harmony with all that 
is. Heed not the tempter's voice, seeking to 
persuade thee thou hast done thy best. To 
have done the best he can is little for the man 
who feels that his ever urgent duty is to make 
himself capable of still better things by push- 
ing day by day into wider and serener worlds. 
Each man is the maker of himself, the power 
he uses being God's; and each present moment 
bears within itself the future's form and 
substance. To be a man is to be a fighter, 
a combatant on the world's wide battlefield, 
where the cohorts of ignorance and sin wage 
ceaseless warfare against the soul. No one is 
by nature good or great or wise, but whoever 
attains such height reaches it by hard toil and 
long struggles with temptations and hindrances 
of many kinds. Education lays the foundation, 
self-education erects the building. Another 
may show the way, but if we would reach the 
goal we must ourselves walk therein. What- 
ever may strengthen body, mind, or soul, the 
educator needs and should make use of. The 
strong man, in the right sense, is also wise 
and good, helpful and loving. They who 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. ly 

starve the body cannot nourish the mind, and 
if the heads of institutions of learning have 
not the means to supply copious, wholesome 
food, they should be made to withdraw from 
the business of education; but if, having the 
means, they seek to save money at the expense 
of health and life, they should be dealt with as 
criminals. To educate to passive obedience 
is to predestine to failure. 

When Demosthenes was asked what makes 
an orator, he replied, ''Action, action, action." 
Had the question been, "What makes a man? " 
the answer should have been the same, — 
"Action, action, action." We know what will 
is only when we begin to act, for action begets 
will. When we clearly see a thing to be pos- 
sible we have begun to teach ourselves how to 
make it real. The circle of thought which 
we create for ourselves and in which we habit- 
ually move, makes us what we are. As the 
gardener by engrafting can produce the most 
precious fruit from an inferior stock, so the 
educator, by implanting fresh thoughts and 
principles, new aims and desires in the mind 
of his pupil, may recreate and transform his 
whole being. The supreme problem for the 
individual, the family, the school, the State, 
and the Church, is how to harmonize liberty 
with order. The higher the source of author- 



1 8 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

ity, and the head of rule, the easier the solu- 
tion. The rhythmic movement of life is the 
mark of health in the physical, the domestic, 
and the social body. In every ill-ordered 
household there is degeneracy. 

The power within and behind nature is the 
power within and behind man, and the more 
we realize that we are part of nature, that what 
we call nature is a force which streams through 
us as a type of law and order, of wisdom and 
harmony, of strength and goodness, the more 
do we advance in dignity of being as rational 
and moral men. Endowments are possibilities 
merely; each one's self-activity must deter- 
mine what for him they shall become. 

When we say man is born free we mean 
nothing more than that he is born capable of 
making himself free by a process of gradual 
emancipation from the thraldom of ignorance, 
selfishness, and sensuality. This, self-educa- 
tion must accomplish for him. In a world 
where multitudes strive for knowledge, power, 
and wealth, the indolent and the listless are 
made use of or thrust back. The law of 
affinity, beginning with chemical atoms, runs 
upward to souls and God. The mind is drawn 
to what is akin to it, as planets are drawn to 
suns. 

Our talents come to us largely from our social 



VIEWS OF education: 19 

inheritance and environment, and they should 
be used for the common good. We begin with 
studying how to learn, and we end with learn- 
ing how to study. The more we advance the 
more conscious we become of obeying ideal 
aims and ends. Only he who strives to dis- 
tinguish himself, to make himself different 
from the crowd around him, becomes wise and 
strong. Be many kinds of man, but be sincere 
and high. What a wise man knows and loves 
is more interesting than himself, and if he 
write he will write of that, not of himself. 
The proper attitude of the mind toward the 
objective world is that of philosophical indif- 
ference. Things are what they are, and we, 
too, from moment to moment, are what we 
are; let the relation be seen and recognized. 
Beware of the will-o'-the-wisp which would 
lead thee to defend whatever thou mayst at 
any time have said or written. Little of what 
the best have written has significance for more 
than one generation. They who have learned 
most have had most to unlearn. 

All the child and youth has been taught, the 
man must relearn if he is to arrive at insight. 
Possession makes us indifferent or self-satis- 
fied; the ceaseless striving after better things 
makes us men. When we consider the dis- 
eases to which man is subject it seems mar- 



20 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

vellous that any one should have good health; 
and when we attend to the innumerable sources 
of his errors, it seems almost incredible that 
any one should think and judge rightly; for 
his mind is swayed from the line of truth by 
youth and by age, by ignorance and by learn- 
ing, by feebleness, as by excessive vigor of 
body, by imagination, and by the lack of it, 
by love and by hate, by hope and by despair, by 
wealth and by poverty, by sluggishness and 
by haste, by fear and by envy, by lust and by 
greed, by pride and by conceit, by rationalism 
and by fanaticism, by cowardice and by hypoc- 
risy, by credulity and by incredulity. How 
then shall he learn to see things as they are? 
Not malice and self-interest alone, but pity, 
sympathy, love, and prudence prompt us to 
deceive. The truth is sometimes cruel and 
brutal, or shocking in its nakedness, and they 
who soften its harshness, or throw a veil over 
its hideousness, will not believe they are 
wicked. The mother hides it from her child, 
the physician from his patient. We soon 
learn all our friends have to tell us; our intel- 
lectual shocks and surprises come from those 
who disagree with us, and they are our best 
teachers. The more we know, the more we 
doubt. Doubt is the shadow which the splen- 
dor of truth as it falls upon the mind always 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 21 

casts. It is easy to speak or write of what we 
know little; they whose knowledge is large 
and profound find less to say. Whoever turns 
his mind habitually and strongly in a given 
direction will find that, little by little, it 
loses the power of taking any other. The 
scientist becomes unable to think poetically 
or religiously; the poet and the mystic lose 
sight of the definiteness of things. Thus the 
soul, like the body, is subdued to what it 
works in. No state of things is good, no 
theory is practice, the real is never the ideal, 
— the spirit whereby and wherein thou livest 
and workest is the all in all. 

O for a thrill of love, a thrill from life's fair prime, 

To make my being start and blossom into rhyme, 

Bring heaven near and give to stars their appealing light 

And to my soul the wings which tempt infinite flight. 

By love we live, when love is dead all things are dead, 

And in a world we move whence God and the soul have fled. 

" Never," says Jean Paul, " has one forgotten 
his pure, right-educating mother. On the blue 
mountains of our dim childhood toward which 
we ever turn and look, stand the mothers who 
marked out to us from thence our life ; the most 
blessed age must be forgotten ere we can forget 
the warmest heart." 

At her death Laura appeared to Petrarch, in a 
dream, and holding out her hand she asked: 



22 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

*' Do you not remember her who influenced 
your youth and led you out of the common road 
of life?" 

A woman cannot hope to make a sage or a 
saint or a hero of the man who loves her, but 
she may, of the child. Contempt for women is 
the mark of a crude mind or of a corrupt heart. 
What strength is there not in the rich joyfulness 
of youth, bursting forth into glad song and 
laughter, and passing lightly away from hard- 
ship and disappointment, out again to where the 
glorious sunshine plays upon the rippling waters 
and the happy flowers. The very memory of 
it all comes back to us like a message from God 
to bid us be stout of heart and to keep growing. 
Those we love sanctify for us the places where 
they have lived ; the spots even where they have 
but passed are sacred. 

The philosophy of life is the philosophy of 
education, and sympathy with the race tends to 
resolve itself into the desire to give to all a right 
culture; for it is plain that in this way better 
than in any other we are able to be of help to 
our fellows. Our interest in education is the 
measure of our interest in the world and in 
humanity. He alone is a true believer in the 
ideal of culture who is persuaded that culture, 
like virtue, is its own reward, that nothing an 
enlightened mind may enable him to obtain is 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 23 

as good as the enlightened mind itself. The 
aim of culture, as it is also the aim of religion, 
is to create an inner strength and enlightenment 
which supersedes and makes superfluous mere 
legalism. 

Power of concentration, of persevering appli- 
cation of the whole mind to what ought to be 
known and done, is a mark of genius, and it is 
also one of the best results of right education. 
The educational value of the study of physical 
science is found in the sense it awakens of the 
universal presence of law and order, and also in 
the training to close and accurate observation 
which it enforces. 

It is easy to educate too much, to put one's 
own mind and will in the place of the learner's ; 
but we are always safe when we help the pupil 
to educate himself. ** The mind," says Schiller, 
*' possesses only what it does." All of us, the 
most ignorant even, know more than we know 
how to put to right use. Prejudices are idols 
to which we sometimes sacrifice the most pre- 
cious things, — the light of the mind, the joy of 
the soul, the free play of the imagination, the 
love of truth itself, and yet a man without pre- 
judices is like a man without a home or a coun- 
try. He is a stranger who finds no fellows, no 
company in which he will gain recognition, for 
nothing makes the crowd so uncomfortable as 



24 THINGS OF THE MIND, 

dispassionate reason, the pure light of the intel- 
lect. It is easy to meet with well-informed 
minds, but we seldom find one who has a real 
world-view and a circle of thought in which he 
is at home, whose life rests upon unity of pur- 
pose, whose conduct is controlled by principle, 
whose thinking has truth for its single aim. In 
former times to assert truth was to risk life, or, 
at the least, loss of name and goods; but now, 
when there is no danger and the whole rabble 
rush in each with his torch to enlighten the 
world, truth, grown ashamed of its nakedness, 
hides from the eyes of men. 

'* Work and enthusiasm," says Goethe, *' are 
the pinions on which great deeds are borne." 
If the pupil see that his teacher is mean or arbi- 
trary, the school becomes for him a place of 
perversion. Language is interesting because it 
is the garb and medium of thought and feeling; 
it is a symbol which has educational value only 
when it brings us into conscious communion 
with the things symbolized. All experience is 
first of all a mental fact. The word " matter," 
like matter itself, is the expression of a condition 
of mind. 

Culture enables us to see how little worth 
most of our knowledge has, how little it deserves 
the name of knowledge. Learn to know and 
feel the soul of goodness, truth, and beauty, 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 25 

which, however hidden, acts everywhere in man 
and in the universe, making the world fair and 
life precious. " There is no easy way of learn- 
ing what is difficult," says De Maistre ; '' the 
unique method is to shut one's door, to say one 
is not at home, and to work." In education the 
essential is not programmes and methods, but 
able and devoted men ; not the things taught, but 
the spirit in which they are taught. To attempt 
to teach morality as a separate something, and 
not to recognize that it ought to penetrate and 
dominate all our studies, is a fatal error. In 
high men the highest happiness springs from 
the consciousness of being and doing right. To 
be truthful and honorable are the most difficult 
virtues, for truth and honor spring from the 
finest sense of duty of which the soul is capable. 
The educator's ceaseless endeavor should be to 
prevent the formation of habits of wrong-doing; 
for such habits are enfeeblement of will, are the 
weakness which is misery. Character is edu- 
cated will. Will is dark, mind is luminous ; and 
it is the purpose of education to flood the will 
with intellectual light. What we steadfastly will 
to be, we become. A mighty purpose gives us 
now, in a way, what we are resolved to have. 
It is hardly a paradox to maintain that it is 
better not to read at all than to read only news- 
papers. Health and wealth are appreciated 



26 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

when they have been lost; knowledge and virtue 
when they have been found. He teaches best 
who enables his pupil to dispense with his aid, 
as he governs best who makes his rule unneces- 
sary. The virtue of the intellect makes us take 
delight in truth and beauty simply because they 
are true and beautiful, as moral virtue makes us 
love goodness simply because it is good. The 
shallowness and triviality of man's spirit is the 
most perplexing puzzle for a serious mind. 
Since he is not really concerned in any intelli- 
gent way, even for his bodily health and well- 
being, is it not idle to suppose in him a yearning 
for truth and love? If he takes little pains to 
make the best of this life, how shall we believe 
that he truly longs for immortal life? Have we 
not all, like biases viveiirs, lost the sense of the 
joy and sweetness of life? To see, to hear, to 
feel, to drink the light of day and star-illumined 
night, to breathe the perfume of flowers and 
ripening corn, to watch the pageant of the 
changing year, the play of children and the 
flight of birds, to dream, to think, to know, to 
believe, to hope, to love, — this and all else which 
only God could give, were bliss and pure de- 
light if we were but sensible of the boundless 
boon. 

'' Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, If we 
will." The finding pleasure in doing right is a 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 2/ 

certain result of a habit of right-doing. Im- 
moral conduct is a mark of retrogression toward 
the life of primitive man; and as savages, 
when thrown into contact with civilized races, 
disappear, so in a healthful society there should 
be an irresistible tendency to eliminate the 
vicious and criminal. Base pleasures deaden 
the relish for life. They who are most con- 
scious of the need of self-improvement are most 
humble, and they w^ho devote themselves most 
assiduously to this task are most wise. The 
best men have no price; they can be bought 
neither with hope of reward nor with fear of 
punishment, purchased neither with money nor 
with place nor with pleasure. Let money be thy 
servant and procurator, not thy lord and master. 
Formerly culture was to be had only in half 
a dozen centres, — in Athens, Rome, or Alexan- 
dria, in Paris, Oxford, or Leipsic; but this is 
true no longer, and when young men tell me 
they cannot pursue the work of self-education 
in a Western village, I believe them. The fault 
lies within themselves. If I have only bread, 
and you want water, you will go to some one 
else; if you want muscle and I have only 
brains, if you want money and I have only vir- 
tue, you will not care for me. To have the 
best of everything is possible only for those 
who are themselves the best. The best thoughts 



28 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

are to be found in literature, but who loves them? 
The best eloquence, poetry, and music, like the 
glories of nature, are wasted merely on clowns 
and boors. The best which has been made 
known to man is the power of love, as it is 
revealed in Christ, but who believes it? Until 
our faith and knowledge enter into our very 
flesh and blood, we neither believe nor rightly 
understand. We truly know only what we have 
undergone, what suffering has taught us. Over 
those who lack the spirit of self-sacrifice, ideals 
have little power; they live in the present, 
absorbed in the selfish desire of possessing and 
enjoying. The discipline of want and sorrow 
by which man has been hammered into shape, 
purified, and made human, is for them simply 
an evil. They must indulge themselves; or, if 
this is denied them they are filled with envy and 
hate. Knowing nothing of the inner aids to 
life, they would grasp everything. They do not 
see that wisdom is taught by sufi"ering, and that 
consciousness of higher needs is indispensable 
to the attainment of wealth of heart and mind. 
Knowledge makes us unafraid, while love ever 
fills us with dread of loss. 

" Not one but many lives are his 
Who carries the world in his sympathies." 

Enthusiasm is a flame which leaps, not from 
mind to mind, but from heart to heart. It is blown 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 29 

into intenser heat by a single heroic example 
than by all the proverbs. Whenever a man of 
genius appears he comes to remain ; and whether 
we love or hate him, he is our master. He who, 
in utter sincerity, devotes his life to a noble cause 
— to religion, freedom, science, or art — maybe 
tempted to think, when the end approaches, that 
he has failed; but such work can no more 
fail than God can fail. 

To-day of all is best : 
The others are quite dead 
And lie deep in the breast 
Of changeless past at rest : 
Crown, then, to-day thy head ; 
To-day be thou God's guest. 

What are numbers? One only God makes 
the universe, one soul may stand against a 
world, one mind see higher truth than a parlia- 
ment of nations. Do we not turn from a thou- 
sand chattering daws to listen to one nightingale 
singing to its love alone? 

Galileo was thought to be a perverter of reli- 
gious truth, but when men came to understand 
him they saw he was a light-bearer through 
God's heavens. Napoleon, the supreme man- 
killer, was a poor shot. The secret of power in 
the world of action lies in the ability to make 
the many do what even the strongest cannot do 
himself ; but this secret, like that of the poet, is 



30 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

known only to those to whom it reveals itself; 
it cannot be taught. The sense of power is an 
essential element in all pleasure, as consciousness 
of defect is always painful. The highest power 
is intellectual and moral, and to know that it is 
ours gives therefore the purest pleasure. The 
greatest minds and hearts run greatest perils. 

Consciousness of defect is the evolutionary 
principle which urges us toward completeness. 
In those who feel they know enough, love 
enough, believe enough, and are all they care to 
be, this principle is lacking. The finer and 
deeper the intellect, the keener and subtler is 
the intellectual conscience, — the love of truth 
for itself, as being our best equivalent of the 
supreme reality, the absolute. Contentment 
with what we have and longing for what we 
have not are the positive and negative poles of 
life. Common natures circle about the positive, 
while the nobler, feeling that this positive is, in 
truth, negative, reach out for the infinite ideal, 
which it is impossible indeed to grasp, but which 
they perceive to be the only essentially real. 

The heart we bear within us makes us men ; 
It is the fountainhead of noble thoughts, 
The source of noble living and of power. 
For there is placed the central seat of God, 
Who to the pure and strong of heart gives peace, 
And courage without weakness to endure 
The worst that may befall a guiltless soul. 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 3 1 

The higher and purer our happiness, the more 
peaceful and tolerant we become. 

Whatever is, is a jnanifestation of force. This 
is the sum of all ideas of being, of that of the 
absolute even, for God is pure act. " I think, 
therefore am," is but the affirmation of the 
identity of force and being. The measure of 
worth consequently is quantity and quality of 
power. Nothing distinguishes men of genius 
from other men so much as their exceptional 
power of attention. They may not be able to 
bear a greater weight of thought than others, 
but they can bear it for a longer time, holding 
it all the while under the pure light of the mind. 
The strength of the strong is developed by 
opposition, by neglect, by threats, and scorn. 
They know their ability, and indignation at the 
wrongs they suffer calls it forth. 

Our fatal fault is facility. Ten thousand 
Americans speak, write, teach, govern, and re- 
form the world with facility, but hardly one of 
us is a master in anything. We are busy with 
many things, but with ourselves scarcely at all. 
And we therefore lack the consciousness of 
defect which impels to the struggle for higher 
worth. Culture lifts us out of the class in which 
we were born, for it takes us away from all 
classes into worlds where only the best live and 
love. The way is hard and long which, out of 



32 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

the dark prison of ignorance wherein we are 
born, leads up to intellectual light and liberty; 
but the goal once reached, the memory of the 
toil and pain is lost in pure delight. The objec- 
tions to culture are, at bottom, objections to 
education; or they are arguments against a par- 
tial, superficial, and false cultivation. Like the 
prejudices of the poor against the rich, they 
spring generally from envy, from a sense of 
inferiority, and not from a real view of the aims 
and ends of culture. Our word " culture " finds 
its best equivalent in the Latin htnnanitas. It im- 
plies a fine humanity, or humaneness, in thought, 
word, and deed ; it is an enlightened and sym- 
pathetic consciousness of all that is best in human 
experience and achievement. It looks away 
from what is personal and partial, from temper- 
ament and whim, from calling and position, 
from family and people, to what is of universal 
and permanent interest; and in this world of 
the universally and permanently interesting, it 
embraces all things, whether they belong to soul 
or body, whether they relate to thought or 
action. That knowledge alone is fruitful which, 
amid struggle and contradiction, ripens within 
the depths of one's own heart and is made part 
of his very being, — is, indeed, himself Coinci- 
dences and harmonies between different nerve- 
centres of the brain, which have been established 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION-. 33 

by education, may disappear through disuse; 
but as steeds, turned loose to graze, when taken 
in hand again, quickly strike the gaits to which 
they have once been trained, so the channels of 
habitual thought are never wholly obliterated, 
but, at the worst, they are choked with a kind 
of mental drift, which a flood of fresh ideas will 
carry away. In the highest poetry there is a 
two-fold life, — that of men and deeds as they 
stand forth in history, and that which genius 
pours in and around them ; and, since life begets 
life, this kind of poetry has supreme educational 
value. To understand a poet, we must feel in 
reading him the emotion which inspired his 
song. His words are set to melody, and the 
music reveals their meaning. 

Best happiness is health of heart, and mind 
Which in sound body works to worthy ends ; 
This is the soul of life, — this makes a man, 
And gives to all his being a God-ward trend. 

The true view of life is the religious ; for no 
other explains our aspirations and longings, or 
justifies enthusiasm and self-sacrifice. 

The worst consequences of the newspaper 
habit may be seen in the young, for whom each 
morning, like a daily meal, accounts of vice and 
crime are served up, to make them incapable of 
admiration, reverence, and awe. What father 
3 



34 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

employs burglars, murderers, and adulterers, or 
quacks, liars, and sophists, as tutors for his 
children? A man's daily reading, like his habit- 
ual conversation, is a symbol of his life and 
character. To one who was presented to him, 
Socrates said: "Speak, that I may see thee." 
Now he would say: " Show me what thou read- 
est, that I may see thee." 

" Most readers, like good-natured cows, 
Keep browsing and forever browse ; 
If a fair flower come in their way 
They take it too, nor ask, ' What, pray?' 
Like other fodder it is food, 
And for the stomach quite as good." 

To free ourselves from the rudeness of our 
early manner and speech is comparatively an 
easy task; what is difficult is to clear the mind 
of prejudice, and to purify the heart from greed 
and sensuality. Galton says that not more than 
one in four thousand may be expected to attain 
distinction. It is to this chosen one among the 
thousands that philosophers, poets, and educators 
always look; and some of them believe that, as 
there is a love which may create life under the 
ribs of death, so genius may evoke, with almost 
miraculous power, thought and desire even from 
the most unpromising sources. When a nation's 
thinkers and poets, heroes and saints are all 
dead, the best part of its life is with the dead. 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 35 

He who Is born to lead finds followers, for nearly 
all men are born to follow. There is radical 
wrong in the education which diminishes or 
weakens the freshness and vigor of the youthful 
mind and body. The best work the student 
does is that which teaches him the love of work. 
Zeal lacks discretion, and a zealous teacher may 
easily overdo his task, just as an anxious mother 
spoils her child with too much care. It is with 
schools as with doctors. If the patient get 
well or die, we praise or blame the physician; 
if the pupil succeed or fail, we accredit it to the 
school, though the cause lie elsewhere. In the 
things of the mind that which is decisive is not 
the length of time, but the concentration of 
power with which we apply ourselves. " The 
writing of a single page," says Jean Paul, *' stim- 
ulates the desire to learn, more than the reading 
of a whole volume." Work to satisfy thine own 
nature, thine innermost craving for truth, beauty, 
and love, — not to please another. Should it 
occur to thee to think thyself worthy of higher 
honor or place, recall to mind the great poets 
and philosophers who have lived and died poor 
and neglected by the world, but " by their own 
spirit deified." 

Failures, for those conscious of inner power, 
are like trumpet-calls to rally to renewed 
attacks. 



36 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

He who has a few facts and arguments at his 
fingers' ends, thinks highly of his learning, as a 
well-dressed fellow with a few dollars in his 
pocket feels rich; but a man of real culture 
gives little heed to his mere facts and argu- 
ments, as one of real wealth hardly knows what 
he has on or in his pocket. To know one thing 
thoroughly, it is necessary to know many things; 
but the one thoroughly known is decisive, is the 
test of one's intellectual grasp. Accuracy is a 
result of the habit of observation and attention. 
Variety and wealth of vocabulary indicate range 
of thought and degree of culture. When to 
appreciate an author it is necessary to- take a 
special point of view, he will, at the most, prove 
interesting only for a few. A fair knowledge of 
some other language than one's mother-tongue 
liberates from the bondage of words. 

A true teacher is a pioneer through the tan- 
gled forest, a shepherd who leads to wholesome 
pastures, a guide who shows the most practicable 
road, a physician who tells what diet best suits, 
a captain who inspires the confidence which is 
half the battle, a friend who makes the long 
way seem short. He has himself become and 
achieved all that he would have his pupil accom- 
plish and be. His example is of more value 
than many lessons, and to know him and to 
live in his presence is joy and enlightenment. 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 37 

How does not intoxicated youth," says Jean 
Paul, *' hang, like bees on flowering lime-trees, 
drinking in the spirit of a celebrated teacher." 
A coward makes a coward ; a dullard, a dullard ; 
a liar, a liar. Alexander risked drinking poi- 
son rather than suffer the poison of distrust. 
" Heavens ! " says Jean Paul again, '* how is it 
that always we find something good in books 
on education, and so seldom anything of it 
in teachers?" Not what the teacher says, but 
what he is and does, draws the young brood 
after him. I remember how I went on in happy, 
healthful ignorance until I was eight years old, 
taught- only to look forward to the school as to 
some Fortunate Isle where Wonderland would 
be shown. I have not been disappointed. 

The teacher's confidence in him gives the pupil 
confidence in himself; and self-confidence lies at 
the root of all achievement. It gives strength, 
and invites help from others ; it is half the wis- 
dom of life. To arouse the educational sense is 
better than to teach rules ; for this is the living- 
fountain from which rules have sprung. " The 
difference between good and bad teaching," says 
Freeman, " mainly consists in this, whether the 
words are really clothed with meaning or not." 
To do any right or useful thing is better than to 
have the fame of Csesar. Let neither thy own 
nor thy party's success lead thee astray, by 



38 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

filling thee with a love of ease or with self- 
complacent thoughts. Love truth ; every lie is 
a lie to God, and he alone is truthful who 
shrinks from a lie as an honest man shrinks from 
a theft. Reverence for all goodness is the 
fragrant flower and ripe fruit of a noble life. 
He who has not learned to find pleasure in the 
good of others is not only uneducated, but un- 
civilized. As we learn to control nature by 
obeying her laws, so we learn to govern our- 
selves and others by obedience to the laws that 
make us men. Solon, when asked how wrong- 
doing in the State could be prevented, made this 
reply : " By teaching those who are not wronged 
to feel the same indignation at wrong as the 
sufferers themselves feel." If a merchant, sell 
honest wares ; if an author, write honest truth ; 
if a preacher, speak honest faith. Sincerity is 
the virtue God and men most love. Let thy 
ceaseless aim be to gain strength, to develop 
strength, to preserve strength, — strength of 
body, strength of mind, strength of will. If 
thou art a gentleman thou wilt be kindly, 
modest and brave, sincere and gracious. *' No 
true luxury, wealth, or religion," says Ruskin, 
" is possible to dirty persons." Behavior, it 
may be said, is the all in all. It is conduct and 
more than conduct. It is what poetry is to 
truth, what style is to thought — it is the fine 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION-. 39 

flower and fair body of noble and righteous life. 
He who can not behave has no claim on our 
attention, no right to appear at all. The reward 
the lover of culture seeks, is the having a culti- 
vated mind, as the reward the lover of God 
hopes for is the having a godlike soul. 

*' That I to-morrow shall be alive 

I frankly do not know ; 
But if to-morrow for me arrive, 
That I to-morrow shall fearless strive, 

Beyond all doubt I know." 

**Who shootes at the midday sonne," says Sir 
Phihp Sidney, "though he be sure he shall 
never hit the marke ; yet as sure he is he shall 
shoote higher than who aymes but at a bush." 



CHAPTER II. 

VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 

I seek not to make men read, but to make them think. — 
Montesquieu. 

n^HE ear is made for the thrill of pulsing air, 
but it is fashioned in the silent chamber of 
the womb ; the eye's home is the luminous 
ether, but it is formed in darkness; and the 
mind which receives all messages from the outer 
world, all intimations from the inner, and weaves 
them into the rich harmony of truth and beauty, 
gains this divine power in solitude, in lonely 
dreams and uninterrupted meditations, far from 
crowds and the noisy contests of vulgar ambi- 
tion. The highest natures are the most respon- 
sive, not only to what speaks to the soul, but 
also to what appeals to the senses. He who 
takes genuine delight in life finds the secret of 
fresh thoughts and inspired words. The phys- 
ical universe is a school, the State is a school, 
the Church is a school, life is a school, and in all 
actual or possible schools, the soul is still its 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 41 

own best teacher. To live and work in the hope 
that it shall be well for those who follow us that 
we have lived, is to breathe the bracing air of 
health and happiness ; but this faith is possible 
only to the unselfish and brave. Morality is 
the victory of man's higher nature over his 
lower. The mark of the lower is that it looks 
to self; of the higher that it looks to God and 
all things. A nation's power and wealth is never 
so well employed as in promoting right educa- 
tion. Love of truth is the basis of character. 
Some emphasize love, others truth; but neither, 
parted from the other, suffices. No truth has 
worth unless it be associated with something 
we love ; no love is real unless it be grounded 
in truth. Sensation is a treadmill, thought leads 
to new worlds. Whatever widens and enriches" 
life, whatever emancipates the soul, is good. 

As the fairest fruit-tree is chiefly wood, break- 
ing only here and there into fragrant blossom and 
luscious meat, so even the best books are mostly 
dull matter, where, at intervals, heavenly truth, 
kissed by the sun of genius, buds and flowers 
into perfect form. The original thoughts and 
words of the most inspired author, a little vol- 
ume will easily contain. 

The Philistine thinks lightly of a work of 
genius, though in some thousand millions of 
men, there was but one able to do this work. 



42 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

Whoever is able to do what is worth doing, and 
able to do it better than any one else, may, 
without misgivings, set to work. Accomplish- 
ment makes cavil absurd. In seeking to raise 
men above the spirit of the age, let us not lose 
sight of what is strong and beneficent in this 
spirit. They who diffuse truth and love belong 
to a higher race than conquerors and shop- 
keepers. It is with books as with men, — it is 
easiest to acquaint one's self with those least worth 
knowing. Plato will no more speak to the dull 
and heedless from the printed page than he 
would have stooped to their level had he met 
them in his Attic grove. *' Privileged minds," 
said Frederick the Great, " take rank with sov- 
ereigns." Nay, they outrank them, just as a 
real man makes a merely titular personage ridic- 
ulous. The impulse to deliver one's self from 
scorn is a motive not less powerful than the 
love of praise. Hence poverty or physical de- 
formity is often a stimulus to exercise of mind. 
Amid the noise critics and readers make about 
reverberant names, from some obscure corner 
or the gloom of a prison cell a Milton or a 
Pascal, a Goldsmith or a Bunyan, a Cervantes 
or an A Kempis, steals in with his little book 
and is immortal. Like men, books have their 
fortunes, but circumstance cannot make what is 
excellent worthless or what is worthless excel- 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION-. 43 

lent. Popularity is won and kept by a noise of 
words, and when the name is no longer sounded 
it is forgotten; but what the best minds once 
approve the best minds will always approve. 
He who finds his pleasure in the mind has what 
pleases ever with him. The thinker is never 
lonely, as the lover is never poor. The best 
legacy a man can leave is a good book. Emer- 
son thought nothing so much wanting in our 
colleges as a professor of books. It is as diffi- 
cult to teach the young to know books as to 
know men. What is best in literature, as in life, 
is seen to be so only by those who have made 
themselves worthy of the heavenly knowledge. 
Richard de Bury says of books : " They are the 
masters that instruct us without rods and ferulas, 
without hard words and anger. If you ap- 
proach them they are not asleep : if you inter- 
rogate them, they conceal nothing: if you 
mistake them, they never complain : if you are 
ignorant they will not laugh at you." 

Books console us for the world of men. Now 
that printed sheets are scattered fast and thick 
as snowflakes from wintry skies, who may hope 
to write aught that shall endure? If any one, 
he who utters sweetest truth in fewest words. 

We live within the mind and heart alone, 
And whatsoever is not there, for us 
Need not exist : and therefore we may find 
Or make a home in every place and clime, 



44 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

And be ourselves the same, though all else change : 
For we are what we know and love, and not 
The things that strike upon the outer sense. 
So even we may live beneath the eye 
Of God and dwell in His eternity, 
While hurrying time with all its roaring sound 
Sinks into nothingness. But truth and love 
Remain always, and we also with them. 

Like a setter afield, be all alive, with eye and 
ear and nose, to catch whatever message may 
be borne to thee from God's boundless game- 
park. The mind is tinged with the colors the 
eye hvabitually rests upon, and there is an unsus- 
pected relation between our habits of looking 
and our habits of thinking. It is easy to speak 
ill of books, the best of them being imperfect 
enough, but they alone bring us close to the 
thought and love of the greatest and noblest 
who have lived. It is hard to meet Vith a 
superior man, and when he is found he will not 
tell his secret; but we are forever in the com- 
pany of God, and in the books of men of genius 
the best that is known lies open to us. What 
innumerable lamps night after night are set 
aglow to illumine the shrines which hold the 
thoughts of genius, and what devout eyes bend 
over them and find therein light for the mind, 
refreshment for the heart, and solace for the 
soul. Thy days are few, O man of genius, more 
brief it would seem than those of other men. 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 45 

Work, then, while time is given thee; clothe 
truth and love in words which for ages shall be 
as full of cheer and comfort as the thought of 
hearthfires to travellers who through the dark- 
ness of wintry nights turn their faces homeward. 
Thy gifts are fatal, but thou wouldst not ex- 
change them for empires. 

The more we live within the mind, the more 
our thought and love take root in eternity: for 
the soul floating in the awful stream of matter 
where all things flow on and change ceaselessly, 
fastens its view upon what is forever the same ; 
and hence when we are truly awake we find 
ourselves in an ever during and infinite world. 
As the diver who wearies not will at last bring 
up a priceless pearl, so the tireless thinker who 
plunges into the ocean of being will be rewarded, 
at the least, by glimpses of truth. Wait for a 
thought, as a fisher for a bite. The curiosity 
of the noblest minds to learn what cannot be 
known would seem to be morbid. They still 
seek what they feel can never be found. But is 
not this bent of the soul an evidence rather that 
we are born for God, for eternal life? Dead 
hopes and vanished dreams, fallen races and 
mouldering ruins He along the way of progress. 
Whoever advances leaves behind somethlne 
that was dear. But why regret illusions which 
had power to lead us astray? The loss increas- 
ing knowledge brings is gain. 



46 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

When we cease to learn wc cease to be inter- 
esting. To learn is to teach one's self; for 
whether we gain intellectual power and knowl- 
edge by observation, by reading, or by listening, 
the result is the outcome of our self-activity. We 
are self-taught, and the educator does best 
when he awakens interest and attention, keeps 
his pupils mentally alive, makes them as eager 
to exercise the mind as lusty boys are to run 
or ride or swim. It is his business to set them 
thinking. Thousands can tell what they know, 
but {q\n can rouse to energetic and persevering 
activity. In a more enlightened age the teach- 
er's chair will be refused to whoever lacks the 
power to awaken interest. All is wrong when 
able men are busy with questions of finance, 
and the training of human beings is left to 
dolts and dullards. The information the teacher 
imparts may be had in any encyclopaedia, but 
the impulse to thought and love can be given 
only by a living soul. 

Hast thou sometimes seen a foolish dog rush, 
with furious barkings, from a farm-yard to attack 
a train? Such is the wisdom of those who growl 
at the nature of things, or who would arrest the 
widening and deepening consciousness of the 
human mind. Whoever loves may hate, who- 
ever thinks may doubt, whoever is free may 
fail. This is a permanent condition of huraan 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 47 

life, which, whatever changes science and prog- 
ress may make in man's environment, will con- 
tinue to be the law of his existence. It may 
happen that the more a thing is proved, the less 
it is believed. We believe in God before we are 
capable of understanding what proof means, and 
no force of argument can strengthen our faith. 

Sometimes when I read a line of Horace or 
Virgil, a sense of pleasure, as from the fragrance 
of moist woodlands in spring, overcomes me, 
and memories of my college days start to life 
like the bursting of buds and the songs of birds. 
The more life we have, the more we feel that to 
be alive is a good and happy thing. Pessimism 
is born of waning vitality, of lack of faith, hope, 
and love. Love clothes the very body of the 
beloved with beauty and sacredness; it is the 
soul throwing itself like a veil about the flesh; 
it is purity and reverence. Its worship and 
adoration spring from itself without thought of 
good or evil. They who have more faith in 
majorities than in God and the soul do not know 
what truth and freedom are. To wish that the 
crowd agree with us is evidence of bad taste, it 
is a mark of vulgarity. Truth cannot be fitted 
to the mind as clothes are fitted to the body ; it is 
not the conclusion of a syllogism, but the result 
of a habit of listening and observing, of doing 
and thinking. Fortunate are they who have 



48 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

learned to love to do what they ought to do. 
The desire for what we lack makes us men. 
"Few friends," says Landor, "fewer acquaint- 
ances, no familiars." A great part of wisdom 
consists in knowing how to get along with fools. 
Great truths are never perfectly luminous. As 
the uncertainty of the hour of death gives zest 
to life, so the obscurity which envelops our 
highest thoughts adds to their charm. What is 
manifest is uninteresting. Our very bodies re- 
quire the mystery of drapery to prevent them 
from becoming vulgar. The suggestion rather 
than the revelation of the Infinite is the charac- 
teristic of high art. " The naked truth " is a 
mistaken phrase, for truth to be known must be 
clothed. The baser metal is the jewel's foil. 
The fine air of pure truth is too rare for our 
breathing. The divine thoughts and inspired 
words of Plato or Shakespeare would never have 
made their way in the world had they not been 
imbedded in a grosser element of trivial ideas 
and vulgar interests. 

What the great number of intelligent and 
enlightened minds accept is but another name 
for truth. The infinite reason is revealed in the 
consent of those who know and think. The 
best work of genius is unintentional, — not what 
it sets itself to do, but what inner necessity drives 
it to do ; and it is only when it thus utters itself 



VIEWS OF education: 49 

that it is creative. Events solve the great prob- 
lems, and our discussions and contentions are 
but the foam that crests the wave. In the world 
of ideas, the multitude hesitate and are as unset- 
tled as children who give fantastic shapes to 
clouds. Truth for them takes the form given to 
it by vivid imaginations, and while they assent, 
they doubt whether they see what the cloud- 
gazer points out, or they are undecided whether 
it is like a whale, or a lion, or a human being. 
The cloud, indeed, keeps no shape, and the 
view the common mind has of the ideal world 
is a view of what is ever changing and dissolving. 

Women are aristocrats, and it is always the 
mother who makes us feel that we belong to the 
better sort. He who lives within lives with 
God, and needs no other friend. This is the 
sum of Christ's life and teaching, the divine wis- 
dom of which the world still fails to comprehend. 
The master need not sign his name ; it is uttered 
by his work. It is not worth while to live if 
life bring not higher knowledge and purer love. 

If he is fortunate who, whenever it pleases 
him, may call together the most select company, 
what shall we say of him who, at any moment, 
can summon from every age and every land, 
their choice spirits, and hold converse with them 
as their equal? Is he not among mortals an 
immortal? Does he not live in serene and 
4 



50 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

enduring worlds, to which nor strength of body, 
nor beauty, nor youth, nor wealth, nor kingly 
power can lead? The fundamental precept of 
pedagogy is this: Study things rather than 
words, which are but the symbols of things. 
'' Words," says Hobbes, " are wise men's coun- 
ters, — they do but reckon with them, — but they 
are the money of fools." The animal hardly 
distinguishes between itself and the external 
world, and the thoroughly conscious mind knows 
that such distinction is largely illusory. Sight, 
whether of the eye or the mind, makes objections 
ridiculous. Reason is God's noblest gift, and to 
discourage its use, whatever the pretext, is impi- 
ous. The mere intellect is perverse ; it takes all 
sides, maintains all paradoxes, and comes to 
understanding only when it listens to the whis- 
perings of common-sense. It is the true enfant 
terrible. In the individual, self-consciousness is 
awakened by self-conscious man ; in the race, it 
is awakened by God. The supernatural is God 
and the soul. It is better to give than to receive, 
for giving makes us generous, and receiving 
makes us helpless. He who has done honest 
work may die with hope. A new thought con- 
soles us for a day which else were lost. Though 
we fail, we shall help the universal cause, if we 
strive under the impulse, not of a party, but of 
God. The more we fall back upon the inner 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 5 1 

source of life, the truer our thoughts become. 
The first and highest need of man is faith in the 
worth and goodness of hfe and the source of 
hfe. To understand the fooHshness of the people, 
study popular men. Sad infirmity of the thinker 
and the poet, — they resent the criticism of those 
whom neither intellect nor imagination controls. 
The worth of the gift lies in the heart of the 
receiver. There has been a time when the 
thought of a game of marbles awakened in me a 
more pleasant expectancy than could anything 
now which pope or king or people might 
promise. 

Infinite riches and variety belong to life, and 
if all seems vain and unprofitable, life's source 
is running low. To imagine we could do some 
worthy thing if we but had a proper field is the 
mark of imbecility. Are not God and his uni- 
verse with thee? Be true to thy better self, 
without thought of what purpose thy word and 
deed may serve. To be weak is to be misera- 
ble, but to be strong is not necessarily to be 
happy. In the right mood the opaque earth 
seems to become transparent; in the wrong 
mood the soul itself is but dull matter. If our 
thought and love were great enough the uni- 
verse would drift in the line of our desire. 

The mark of a cultivated mind is ability to 
look at all things from an impersonal standpoint, 



52 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

to lose sight of itself and to see with the eyes of 
others and of God. Only the noblest souls feel 
how impossible it is to be wholly sincere and 
loving, to attain to the ideal which is perfect 
truth and love. Upon those who give them- 
selves through a lifetime to high and noble 
aims, the shadow of their light at least will fall. 
The wish to be left alone, to be lost sight of, is 
thought to be insincere, but only by those who 
live in the transitory rather than in the abiding 
world. The unhappy, if they are noble, are 
often the noblest; for their misery ceaselessly 
drives them to self-development. When we 
grow weary of an occupation, a place, or a 
friend, it is of ourselves we are weary. We 
seek new surroundings, but what we need is a 
new self. Thrift is a virtue we all praise. The 
thrifty succeed; they gain wealth, place, and 
honor; that they generally unfit themselves for 
knowledge and the rational enjoyment of life 
seems to be a minor thing. The aim and pur- 
pose of nearly all men is to improve, not them- 
selves, but their circumstances, and so long as 
this is so there is no hope of any real improve- 
ment at all A blow in the prize-ring sets 
millions to reading and talking, but after a 
month it is forgotten ; a stroke of the pen passes 
unnoticed, but after a thousand years it may still 
be an impulse to noble thoughts and deeds. 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 53 

" Other delight than to learn I know not," says 
Petrarch. The best any one may know of life 
and literature lies open to all, but in the pres- 
ence of the highest truth and beauty the multi- 
tude are indifferent or incredulous. Genius is 
attention; it is a mind held to the contempla- 
tion of truth and beauty with a fascination like 
that the fairest objects exert upon the eye. It 
exists to reveal God's thought to the world, 
and its most favorable environment is poverty, 
opposition, and solitude. If thou desirest the 
approbation of fools, be foohsh. He who holds 
no responsible position, but is simply a looker-on, 
has a reserved seat at life's spectacle. Let him 
learn to see things as they are, and to make 
authentic report. The only interests worthy of 
the serious attention of a lover of truth are those 
of the mind. Literature is the result of a per- 
sonal view of things, and science, therefore, can 
never, in the strict sense, be literature ; that is, 
it can never be a subject of the profoundest 
interest to man. The mere sequence of phe- 
nomena concerns us little ; what does concern 
us is the relation of the whole to our own life, 
and this is the proper business of literature. 
The impulse to higher and freer life is given 
by individuals, never by the crowd, who are 
always swayed and dominated by the lower 
needs and common instincts. Profound books 



54 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

are not popular, not because they are hard to 
understand, but because only a few take genuine 
interest in the questions which underlie every 
theory of being and of life. The many are con- 
tent to see and hear, to taste and touch, and 
what is beyond is for them as though It did not 
exist. And when one driven by irresistible 
impulse takes ultimate problems in utter serious- 
ness, he is misunderstood and called irreligious 
for being religious. Thought cannot compass 
thee, O God, words cannot name thee. We 
can but adore with boundless yearning, know- 
ing thou art above, beyond, and in all, the all in 
all of every soul that thinks and loves. Only 
an habitual student can exercise an intellectual 
influence; only an habitual meditator and holy 
liver can exercise a moral and religious influ- 
ence. To teach the child religion is doubtless 
a difficult task, but in the right environment 
it will insinuate itself into his life, to elevate his 
thoughts, widen his sympathies, and purify his 
desires. ** Learning," says Fuller, '' hath gained 
most by those books by which the printers have 
lost." He is a wise man who uses even the 
most trifling happenings in his daily life for his 
own improvement. For purposes of education 
a true man is worth more than all manuals, 
codes, systems, and apparatus. Better listen to 
Socrates on a street corner than to Dryasdust 



VIEWS OF education: 55 

in a marble palace. Repetition is nature's 
secret. Keep on, and how far thou shalt go, 
only God knows. The most moral thing in 
nature is fidelity to fact; change a word, add 
a line, and if there is an eye to see it is patent. 
What form genius shall take, God alone can 
determine ; but whatever form it take, men will 
be grateful. 

Occupations which deform and stiffen the 
body Aristotle calls crafts, and by the same 
word he designates all money-getting pursuits, 
because they preoccupy and degrade the intel- 
lect. The highest man, he says, finds his 
pleasure in the noblest things. 

"The Ephesians," says Heraclitus, "cast out 
Hermodorus, the worthiest man among them, 
saying: * No one of us shall be worthiest, or let 
him be so elsewhere and among others.'" De- 
velopment of faculty is the educator's aim and 
end, the imparting of information is incidental 
and subsidiary. The making education free 
weakens the sense of responsibility in parents. 
There is a restless activity in the breast of youth, 
and he is the best educator who turns this energy 
to high and generous ends. In pursuing our 
personal aims we run in the dark; when we 
seek nothing but truth and love, God's light 
shines about us. I buy many books, and at 
rare intervals find one worth more than I paid 



56 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

for all the others. These are the pure metal in 
the mine which consists for the most part of 
clay and rock. The newspaper is the sewer 
of average opinion. It is well this should have 
issue, but when we drink or bathe we seek pure 
fountains and clear streams. Say boldly what 
thou boldest to be true ; however mistaken, 
thy thought and speech will not upset God's 
world. Seek not what thou mayst do, but seek 
the spirit from which all true work proceeds. 
What we feel, not what we think, determines 
conduct; doctrines which have no power to 
inspire emotion have none to impel to action. 
We may educate ourselves in every direction ; 
and they are not the least wise who strive to 
learn the secret of simple cheerfulness. Who 
shall teach men to find their pleasure in what 
strengthens, refines, and enlightens? Idleness, 
ennui, listlessness, trifling occupations, and friv- 
olous amusements consume the time, which, 
rightly used, would make us all strong, wise, and 
happy. 

The memory of our purest and noblest joys 
remains with us like a fountain of perpetual 
youth, while that of the wrong we have done is 
the only pain which follows us with unrelent- 
ing persistence. *' The fool," says Confucius, 
" complains because he is unknown, the wise 
man because he does not know." It matters 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION'. 57 

little what our special studies may be, if the 
issue is mental cultivation and moral worth. An 
elephant that has lived a hundred years has had 
less of life than a boor who has lived but fifty, 
and the boor of fifty has had less of life than is 
given to a poet within an hour. " Glory is so 
sweet," says Pascal, *' that whatever it is asso- 
ciated with, though it be death itself, seems 
desirable." Acquaintance with the best spoils 
everything else. We can never make the world 
of thought a world of facts. Since, however, 
the world of facts is everywhere and at all times 
unlovely, they are fortunate who learn to live 
habitually in the high regions which only the 
mind can inhabit. Books are an ever present 
opportunity to turn each idle or weary hour to 
profit or delight. '' The soul of a people," says 
Voltaire, " dwells in the few who employ, sup- 
port, and govern the multitude." Let us say, 
rather, in the few who inspire, enlighten, and 
guide the many. 

Strength and energy are not the same. The 
energetic are often weak ; and the strong, be- 
cause they are restful and self-contained, seem to 
want energy. The American has too much en- 
ergy and too little strength. He is hurried, and 
lacks the repose which is the sign and symbol 
of strength. Not what happens, but the way in 
which we take what happens, is decisive. 



58 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

The scholar among his books is in paradise, 
the swineherd is happier among his pigs. Take 
information from whoever can give it, but follow 
thy judgment. *' He who first praises a book 
becomingly," says Landor, '* is next in merit to 
the author." He who utters a truth with new 
depth and intensity makes it new, though the 
doctrine be old. Is it not a divine privilege to 
speak a word, to write a phrase, to do a deed, 
which one's fellow-men shall never be willing 
to forget? Those who love us understand us 
better than those who hate. Let us take cour- 
age, then, and not think too meanly of ourselves. 
** Those who trust us," says George Eliot, " edu- 
cate us." A people's importance lies not in its 
numbers or its wealth, but in the contribution it 
makes to the higher good of mankind. If we 
talk often with a man of profound and vigorous 
mind we come to see things in the light in 
which they appear to him ; and if we make 
ourselves familiar with a great book into which 
he has put the best of his life, we shall be trans- 
formed into his likeness in a yet more effectual 
way. Love divines the destiny of the beloved, 
and while it points to the rugged way which 
leads to high achievement, inspires the courage 
to walk therein with as fresh a heart as though 
it were some flowery path, illumined by the 
light of Beauty's eye. They who know and 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 59 

love are able to render the best service. Gifts 
leave us what we were, but whoever loves and 
teaches us bestows new and richer life. Per- 
fection consists in realizing the completest ac- 
cord among the variety of fully developed en- 
dowments. The loving heart, the thinking 
mind, the glowing imagination, the command- 
ing conscience, all acting with freedom and 
with power, form the pure light of a perfect 
human life. What is so wonderful as a plastic 
soul, which, coming into this world of fatal laws 
and fixed forms, moults its wings and, taking 
new flight, looks on the whole as though it but 
now created its universe? 

When the high hope and thought of youth 
remain real and living in the mature man, the 
result is a great and noble character. 

Believe in no triumph which is won by the 
loss of self-respect or the deadening of faculty. 
There is no formula for the discovery of truth. 
Genuine life is life for others. The faith, the 
hope, the love, the joy, the strength which we 
impart thereby first become truly our own. 
The strongest cannot always soar: the eagle 
himself stoops to earth for food and rest. All 
work and no play is the dullard's way. The 
more men think, the less will they agree ; but it 
is more important that they should think than 
that they should think alike. Questions of 



6o THINGS OF THE MIND. 

money separate husband from wife, brother 
from brother, and friend from friend. They 
make all men suspicious and less loving, be- 
cause questions of money are questions of life, 
— they mean labor, self-denial, endurance, the 
long and hard struggle for independence, for 
the possession of what keeps us from beggary, 
from sneers and taunts and kicks. Envy, re- 
sentment, and hatred are painful feelings, and 
if virtue permitted us to entertain them, wisdom 
would forbid. The saddest truth is better than 
the most pleasant lie. In the best poetry is 
found the most perfect expression of the purest 
truth. Truth is most honored when 't is matched 
with deeds. The most useful things are those 
which make life good and fair. He who is 
familiar with the best that has been written 
thinks modestly of himself; he does not mis- 
take his crotchet for a panacea, or imagine that 
irritation is enlightenment. 

The dogged will to excel effects its purpose. 
The intellect which analyzes and weakens all 
else is powerless in the presence of feeling; 
what we truly love is our very life and resists 
the destructive force of the critical faculty. 

The mind is drawn out and made capable of 
knowledge when it is aglow wdth emotion, as 
the smith forges the metal into shape when it is 
at white heat From every flower genius sucks 



VIEWS OF education: 6i 

its sweet, but bears within itself the power to 
make it honey. 

There are books whose disappearance would 
impoverish the w^hole race. Keep striving ; 
God alone knows what sweet and helpful work 
thou mayst be appointed to do. 

'* In nature there 's no blemish but the mind," 
No beauty but the mind doth make it fair. 

Good fortune is the happy ordering of circum- 
stance, making knowledge and virtue easy. 
In the company of noble minds we grow strong 
and serene. Power to think is like a mother's 
breast — the more it is appealed to, the more 
abundantly it yields. Where emphasis is needed 
the writer has failed ; emphasis is vulgar. The 
superlative is false style. The secret of style is 
high thought and pure feeling. Right expres- 
sion of true thought is final. " Ideas," says 
Rivarol, "make the round of the world; they 
pass from tongue to tongue, from century to 
century, until they clothe themselves in a liv- 
ing and luminous phrase and become the pat- 
rimony of mankind." It takes half a lifetime to 
learn to know the studies we should neglect. 
The higher thy gifts, the easier it is for thee to 
go astray. Agree with thyself; with another, 
agreement can, at the best, be but superficial. 
" The temple of literary fame," says D'Alem- 



62 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

bert, " is the home of the dead who dwelt not 
there when they were alive, and of a few of the 
living who for the most part shall be thrust 
forth as soon as they are dead." Memory 
obeys the heart; where there is love, there is 
no forgetfulness. We are worth what our love 
is worth. The perennial charm of erotic writ- 
ing witnesses to the feebleness of reason ; man's 
thought circles forever and forever about an 
animal instinct, meant not for the happiness of 
the individual, but for the propagation of the 
race. " Not the morning nor the evening star," 
says ^neas Sylvius, " is so fair as the wisdom 
which is learned by the study of literature." 

Rest in thy weary, helpless hour; 
So shall the good have double power. 

We can know so little; let us at least not be 
afraid to learn. He is noble who is inspired 
by thoughts which mean blessings for men. 
What is worthless in life and literature, we easily 
learn to know; what is best only patient labor 
and long experience will teach us. 

Whether education bestows power or merely 
gives freer and more varied action to original 
endowments is a question of words. It brings 
into play faculties which without it do not exist 
or are in abeyance. 

Our highest yearnings mark the degree of 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 6^ 

culture we have attained ; the rude desire pleas- 
ure, wealth, and notoriety, the enlightened long 
for truth and love. 

In the best poetry is found the highest ex- 
pression of the deepest truth. Socrates looked 
upon himself simply as one who took interest 
in noble-minded and high-hearted young men, 
and the favorite disciple of the blessed Saviour 
was a pure and generous youth, who has given 
to the world the deepest insight into the Mas- 
ter's spirit and teaching. The thought of the 
books I have not read, and which like unknown 
friends are waiting for me, keeps me young. 
The ideal of peace, of repose, which Words- 
worth calls the central feeling of all happiness, 
is that of the weak or weary. Strong and eager 
men prefer almost any kind of existence to the 
tranquil flow of uneventful days. 

Haste is the mark of immaturity. He who 
is master of his tools and certain of himself 
knows that he is able, and neither hurries nor 
worries, but works and waits. As what one can 
lift or bear depends on strength and training 
of body, so what one can understand or appre- 
ciate depends on vigor and discipline of mind. 
Thou wouldst pour truth into the hearts of men, 
but wouldst thou pour water into a sieve? Thy 
doctrines will be of little help unless the heart 
and mind be made whole. There are no sadder 



64 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

words than these : whiskey and women. They 
are the epitaph which should be written on so 
many thousand tombstones on which only lies 
are engraved. World-moving ideas spring from 
single minds and never from the deliberations 
of many; and the men of genius from whom 
we receive this deeper insight into the nature of 
things, dwell habitually in thought with what is 
permanent, eternal, and infinite. Herbert Spen- 
cer utters a caution " against striving too strenu- 
ously to reach the ideal." In other words, he 
bids the young beware lest perchance they be- 
come too earnest in their efforts to think highly, 
to act nobly, to love purely, to believe sincerely 
and to hope steadfastly. Habitual intercourse 
with nature inspires the love of life, and it rec- 
onciles to death; for everywhere in earth and 
air, there is fulness of life, content and blest 
within itself; and when death comes, it comes 
like sleep to tired children who, having played 
the whole day long, sink quietly to rest. We 
cannot have full sympathy with our fellows, if 
we have none with nature and with lower ani- 
mals. " Sad, indeed," says Herbert Spencer, 
** is it to see how men occupy themselves with 
trivialities and are indifferent to the grandest 
phenomena, — care not to understand the archi- 
tecture of the heavens, but are deeply interested 
in some contemptible controversy about the 



VIEWS OF education: 65 

intrigues of Mary Queen of Scots ; are learn- 
edly critical over a Greek ode, and pass by 
without a glance that grand epic written by the 
finger of God on the strata of the earth." 

He who writes need not, but he who publishes 
must think of a reader; and his hope is that 
some of the pleasure and strength his thoughts 
have given to himself will be communicated to 
others ; for if to him they have not been a source 
of light and joy, in printing them he is but a 
coiner and passer of counterfeit money. 



CHAPTER III. 

VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 

'Tis in the advance of individual minds, 
That the slow crowd should ground their expectation, 
Eventually to follow. 

Browning. 

I. 

THE popular idea of education is that it is 
a process whereby the young are fash- 
ioned into money-earning machines. Whether 
the machine is called an artisan, a merchant, 
a lawyer, or a physician is of minor importance. 
The ideal of the State is good citizenship, the 
ideal of the Church is Christian obedience; 
but where shall we find a school which simply 
aims to bring all the scholar's endowments 
into free, full, and harmonious play.? Who 
understands that man is more than a money- 
earning machine, more than a citizen, more 
than a member of a church, being nothing less 
than a son of God, who is infinitely strong, 
all-knowing, all-loving, all-fair.? Go boldly 
forward along the path thy inmost heart feels 
to have been made for thee, nor stop to ask 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 6/ 

whither it lead. The way is thine, the end is 
in God's keeping. Education is emancipa- 
tion; it breaks down the prison walls in which 
the soul is immured, takes it into the light, 
and bids it soar through the boundless universe, 
upborne on the wings of truth and love. 

Every organism holds within itself the seed 
of something better than itself, for the infinite 
God lives within and broods over all. To 
remain stationary is hardly better than death; 
imitation is a kind of servitude; the unfolding 
and upbuilding of one's own being is life and 
liberty. Political liberty is not freedom; it 
is, at the best, but opportunity to make one's 
self free. An enlightened mind is a sanctuary 
where no tryant may enter. There the Eternal 
stands guard. He who leads the mind to new 
worlds or to new ways of contemplating God 
and the universe is a general benefactor, whose 
life-enlarging influence all who think shall 
feel. The tendency which is in things and 
times requires the shaping and guiding hand 
of great personalities to turn it to human pur- 
poses and ends. An original force is from 
God and without inner limitation. Its bound- 
aries can be fixed only by its environment. 
Repression inevitably turns to evil, and the 
teacher does best work when he wisely stimu- 
lates and directs the energies of his pupils. 



6S THINGS OF THE MIND. 

The best school is that which best helps the 
free and healthful development of each one's 
individual endowments; which best enables 
the youth to become such a man as God and 
nature intend him to be, not such a one as 
another's whim would make him. He whom 
the wanderer's heart drives to far lands sad- 
dens his friends who love to stay at home; he 
whom a divine thirst for truth impels ever 
into new regions of thought grieves his near 
ones whom conventional opinions satisfy. To 
become an ethical fact, to have moral worth, 
knowledge must pass into action. When 
scholars become doers the new order will 
begin. In the presence of whatever system 
of thought, ask yourself whether it can be 
made a rule of life; for life, and not specula- 
tion, is the test of truth. 

Our educators take advantage of the igno- 
rance and inexperience of the young to draw 
them away from true ideals. They educate 
with a view to institutions, and not with a 
view to the Eternal. Their idea of truth is 
that it is a conventional something; their God 
is current opinion. The preservation of insti- 
tutions can never be the end for which we 
educate. On the contrary, a right education 
would form a race which would create for 
itself a higher and nobler environment than 



VIEWS OF education: 69 

any we know. Individuality of power and cul- 
ture is the ideal each one should strive to 
attain. Each soul, worth calling a soul, comes 
into this world unlike all other souls; and the 
urgency of God and nature within it cries out : 
Be thyself, not another. Do the work, speak 
the word thou wast born to do and speak. God 
makes each one; the inner voice each one 
hears is God's; become God's man, and let 
God's word find embodiment in the air thou 
coinest into human speech. Be not a machine 
to utter again what others have said; be an 
aboriginal soul, alive in God, acting and speak- 
ing from out the infinite source of all things. 
It is not conceivable that God should wish to 
dwarf or paralyze human activity. Let no 
lesser power, then, bid us keep reason and 
conscience in abeyance. 

Public opinion is a tyrant, who would make 
men cowards and hypocrites ; and it is so easy 
to make them cowards and hypocrites. That 
which dwarfs or darkens our being, though it 
should bring boundless wealth or endless fame, 
is simply evil. For what life -period do we 
educate.? Childhood and youth are sacrificed 
to manhood, manhood to old age, which, for 
the few who reach it, is made miserable by 
this vicious philosophy. Strong, free, and 
joyous self-activity, during the whole course 



70 THINGS OF rim MIND, 

Oi life, can alone develop high, gracious and 
noble men and women. Whoever or whatever 
impedes thought and love is evil. When once 
we accept repression as a legitimate principle, 
there is no degradation to which we may not 
descend. Uniformity and equality are pos- 
sible only when the play of man's nobler 
faculties is hindered. Why should we think 
it desirable to make all men alike, since God 
makes them unlike, and since the more truly 
they are alive, the greater their unlikeness 
becomes.-* Passion is the surging of life's 
current, and the effort to weaken or destroy it 
is an attempt on life. The wise educator seeks 
not to lessen passion, but to increase the intel- 
lectual and moral power by which it may be 
controlled. 

Life is the supreme good, and whatever 
lowers or impoverishes it is evil. God cannot 
place himself above truth, and a real mind 
would not suffer dictation from a parliament 
of mankind. Live not in a great city, for a 
great city is a mill which grinds all grain into 
flour. Go there to get money or to preach re- 
pentance, but go not there to make thyself a 
nobler man. The tendency to place educa- 
tion — elementary education at least — almost 
wholly in the hands of women is wrong. The 
educator's secret lies in the power to stimu- 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION-. yi 

late, and this power man possesses in a very 
much greater degree than woman. He is 
the active, she the passive principle. The 
result of the social evolution, of the reign of 
democracy, seems to be the destruction of the 
finer varieties and the formation of a homo- 
geneous mass of coarse fibre. The making 
use of human beings as means rather than 
ends is immoral. In this lies the condemna- 
tion of our industrialism. 

The decisive inequalities are those of mind 
and heart. The great dividing line is that 
which separates the wise from the foolish. All 
work is like a task set a child; its chief worth 
lies in the exercise it compels, in the educa- 
tion it gives. The truth we seek, more than 
that which we possess, rouses and educates our 
powers. The temper in which we face the in- 
telligible universe, rather than the power with 
which we deal with its problems, is the test 
of mental character. Look at the world in the 
pure light of thy own reason, and not through 
the medium of books and systems. He whose 
superiority rests upon inner excellence may 
say to his fellowmen: Provide for me while I 
feed your minds and souls. To do work one 
loves is to be happy. Blessed is he who, hav- 
ing found the highest thing he is able to do, 
gives his life to the task. 



72 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

All Opinions may be entertained except 
those which weaken and dishearten. The test 
of the worth of a living faith in God is the 
strength it gives, the courage it inspires. The 
objection to culture is that it opens up a world 
of delightful views, in which we rest, feeling 
that action is vain. If our whole nature con- 
sciously bathed in the being of God we should 
not only be purer and holier, but we should 
have more talent, more genius, more ability of 
every kind. To believe this is something; to 
know and feel it is joy, strength, and freedom. 
To make the mind the mirror of all that is, is 
not enough; we must blend with all that is, 
love it, recreate it, and make it our own. 
They who bring the noblest gifts bring them 
to men too dull to know their worth; and 
years, centuries sometimes, pass before the 
divinely great are understood. An original 
sinner more readily finds pardon than an 
original thinker. What we are decides our 
tastes, — it is well with the mole in its 
burrow, it is well with the swine in its trough. 
The crowd are willing to proscribe the culture 
and virtue which are a reproach to them; their 
hatred is a form of envy. Men are not equal ; 
and were they so, there would be no hope of 
better things. The multitude move, and have 
always moved, in a world of low thoughts and 



VIEWS OF education: 73 

desires; and the few who, daring to be unlike 
the many, rise to higher modes of life, are the 
benefactors and civilizers by whom progress 
xs made possible. The doctrine of equality is 
a prejudice of the weak and ignorant, whose 
conceit persuades them that none are strong 
and wise. The best are corrupted and dis- 
heartened by the crowd who have neither 
knowledge nor courage. Whatever the com- 
pound the chemical elements are the same; 
and among savages and barbarians the indi- 
vidual is but an atom, an undistinguished part 
of a homogeneous mass. Hence the measure 
of the progress of the individual is the firm- 
ness and distinctness with which he stands for 
himself alone. 

The only right opposition to inequality is 
universal opportunity for the best education. 
The fundamental law is the promotion of God- 
given endowments ; and in a wisely ordered 
State there should be those whose office would 
require them to seek for the best talent, and 
to give it the best nurture, that no origiaal 
power might be hindered from unfolding itself. 
Love of company is a chief obstacle to im- 
provement. We cannot remain alone; and 
when we are together we bore, stupefy, and 
corrupt one another. We meet to sink into 
the lower life of eating and drinking, of gossip 



74 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

and play. To be fit to be alone is the first 
condition of progress. Another obstacle is 
the labor to which the multitude are con- 
demned. Their work is like the alcohol and 
tobacco it enables them to buy; it is a deaden- 
ing of sensation, a refuge from consciousness, 
a partial escape from life. Thus the many 
are bestialized that the few may keep company, 
eat, drink, and dawdle. Were there now some 
inspired hero to go through the world re- 
uttering the Psalmist's cry, "In my indigna- 
tion I said, every man is a liar," the echo from 
all hearts would be : We know it. But only 
fools tell the whole truth. Even the pious 
will never understand that it is better men 
should lose faith than that a lie be told. He 
who should stand with perfectly frank open- 
heartedness before the public would now be 
looked upon as lacking mental balance. He 
would be like one who, single and defenceless, 
presents himself to an armed and angry mob. 

Is it not the tendency of democracy to make 
men insincere and hypocritical, since, when 
the law makes all equal, the able resort to 
cunning and deceit to assert their superiority .-^ 
What the barons accomplished by brute force, 
our successful men reach by smartness. Genius 
is best sense, and its essential quality is sin- 
cerity. It is fidelity to fact, to the thing seen 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 75 

and felt. It is the great educator; and 
teachers who lack genius do their best work 
when they bring their pupils into sympathetic 
communion with the masterpieces of creative 
minds. When a youth first gives his heart to 
some hero, who to him seems Godlike, he 
enters the vestibule of the temple of culture. 
How many of the best and bravest has not 
Plutarch made conscious of the divinity within 
them ! The lives of warriors — " of those who 
waged contention with their time's decay " — 
are alone worthy to be written. Let popular 
men sink into oblivion with the populace that 
made them. 

The worth of striving depends not upon the 
success, but upon the fidelity and perseverance 
with which we continue to hope and labor. 
The stayer wins, whether the weapons be brawn 
or brains. Intellectual insight is the purest 
ray that falls from heaven, and they who seek 
to break or obscure its light with the grime 
and smoke of prejudice and passion are the 
devil's minions. Knowledge problems are but 
a small part of education. Man is not pure 
intellect, — he is life; and life is power, good- 
ness, wisdom, joy, beauty, health, yearning, 
faith, hope, love, action. Make your man a 
mere science machine, and what more is he 
than an animal that measures, weighs, and cal- 



'jG THINGS OF THE MIND. 

culates? When you have told me all that is 
known about the atoms and stars, you have 
brought to my notice but lifeless facts, whereas 
I crave for truth, — truth athrill with life. 
The perfect man is not merely a knower and 
thinker, but he is also one who lays hold on 
life and does as well as he thinks. 

The test of the value of learning is its effect 
upon the conduct of life. There is a right 
and a wrong faith, but what we believe deter- 
mines character less than the force and in- 
tensity with which we believe. Hope may 
quicken or may deaden the soul. He whose 
main hope is that he shall die rich has begun 
to dig the grave of his nobler faculties. What 
we yearn for is the test of our civilization. If 
material ends are our ideals, we are no better 
than barbarians. When we are unable to 
believe in the divinity of love, the source of 
life runs dry within us, and our life withers 
like a tree whose root has been cut. Love 
beautifies, hate distorts the object we contem- 
plate. That man is God's son is a noble faith, 
but one which daily contact with human beings 
tends to destroy; and they who, in spite of 
disenchanting experience, continue really to 
hold this faith, live the life of Christ. The 
liberty which is favorable to high and heroic 
personalities is the best. Priceless things alone 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. J J 

are good, — genius, holiness, heroism, faith, 
hope, and love. What has a price has small 
value. The past was not what it appears to us 
to have been; the future will not be like any- 
thing we can imagine; the present is ours, 
and we should use it to do the highest which 
through us is possible. 

An encyclopaedia is not the book a wise 
student chooses for purposes of self-culture; 
a man whose brain-cells are stored with innu- 
merable facts is not the kind of teacher an 
enlightened educator selects for the training 
of young minds. The teacher's value lies 
more in what he is than in what he knows ; and 
book-worms are, as a rule, incompetent educa- 
tors. The sublimest emotions take us nearer 
to God, to the inner heart of being, than intel- 
lectual views. Hence literature, poetry above 
all, the child of the exalted moods which the 
sympathetic contemplation of the Infinite and 
of nature creates, has greater educational value 
than science. God and his universe are more 
than all our facts. Wouldst thou go to the 
relief of the unhappy.'* Give them courage, 
faith, hope, and love, — not money, but a new 
heart. 

In literature and in works of science there 
is a revelation of the best thoughts and the 
most accurate knowledge the greatest minds 



78 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

have possessed; but the revelation is for those 
alone who make themselves capable of receiv- 
ing it, — from the rest it is hidden. In litera- 
ture, as in all things spiritual, quality is 
everything, quantity goes for nothing. A 
phrase outweighs whole volumes. He who 
seeks to become wise should have leisure, and 
often be alone with the noble dead, who for 
enlightened minds live again as friends and 
helpers. From the day Alexander crossed the 
Hellespont to conquer the world until now, 
superior intelligence and courage have tri- 
umphed over numbers. Majorities do not 
rule; they are but weapons in the hands of a 
wise and high-spirited or a cunning and corrupt 
minority. They who feel the need of belong- 
ing to the majority know not the infinite worth 
of truth and love. 

The imperfectly educated mind is fond of 
controversy, as rude natures take delight in 
quarrels. When a thought comes, fasten it 
with the pen, as you hang a picture on the 
wall. Thou art taller than I .-* I will plant a 
grain of maize, whose tassel in three months 
shall overtop my head; but I am more than 
the stalk. Art stronger.? A yearling bull is 
too, yet I am more than it. Hast higher 
place.? So has yonder eagle on his jutting 
crag, but mind outsoars the reach of wings. 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION-. 79 

Art wiser and nobler? I bow to thee and am 
thy servant; be thou my master. If thy influ- 
ence be evil, desire that it perish; if it be 
good, the wise and virtuous will wish it to 
survive. He whom notoriety intoxicates is a 
vulgar fellow; the love of fame itself is an 
infirmity; Godlike is he alone who lives for 
truth and love. The multiplicity and empti- 
ness of books bring concise and pregnant writ- 
ing into favor, — as the increase of knowledge, 
rendering the compassing of it by one man, 
even in a single science, impossible, drives 
the learned into specialties. The thoughts 
which as we write them seem warm and glow- 
ing as the heart's blood, look cold and dead 
on the printed page. They are like guests 
who still remain when the song and dance are 
done, when the flowers have faded and the 
lights are out. 

An important end of education is to render 
us conscious of our ignorance; for this con- 
sciousness will impel us to seek knowledge. 
A new truth which offends our habitual think- 
ing hurts like a blow. It is as when we heed- 
lessly strike the foot against a stone, and grow 
indignant, not because we were careless, but 
because it was lying there. Culture alone can 
overcome this unwillingness to accept un- 
pleasant truths. All things that are done are 



8o THINGS OF THE MIND. 

done in time, and our ill success is often due 
to the belief that we can accomplish at once 
what only time can bring about. The best 
work is done by hard work. All men have the 
right to know whatever is true, to love what- 
ever is fair, and to do whatever is good ; and 
the aim and end of education is to help them 
to all this. We all live in the midst of a 
paradise which might be ours, but which for 
most of us is hopelessly lost. They who 
make pastimes life occupations, whatever their 
titles and possessions, are but vulgar trifiers. 
"When an idea or a sentiment takes hold of a 
people and gains such sway as to impel them 
to heroic enterprise, it exalts, ennobles, and 
civilizes; it issues in deeds which mark his- 
toric epochs, and remain as imperishable evi- 
dence of the creative force of enthusiastic 
faith in the worth of truth and love. In indi- 
viduals also the purifying and strengthening 
influence of persistent devotion to intellectual 
and moral ideals manifests itself in new power 
of thought and fresh delight in life. 

Suggestion is an educational force of the 
first importance; for the mind is quick to 
respond to intimations rightly given, but grows 
listless and inattentive when truth is made 
plain. The suggester excites curiosity and sets 
reason and imagination to work, while the 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 8 1 

demonstrator puts us to sleep. Prove as little 
as possible, but set the young dogs on the 
scent of what you would have them run down. 
Whatever starts the play of the intellectual 
imagination is profitable and delightful. The 
pleasure and instruction we find in a poem or 
a painting, a building or an oration, are due 
largely to the power with which they compel 
the mind to exercise itself. He who pro- 
vokes multitudes, who forces them to recognize 
that their conceit is but a form of ignorance, 
hypocrisy, or vulgarity, is a benefactor, but the 
adulators of the people are confidence men. 
Where there is right education the future need 
not be considered; for each hour brings its 
reward of fairer and richer life. The maxim 
" Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof " 
applies also to the good. Do now the best thou 
canst do. This is thy whole business, and the 
rest may be left to God. 



n. 



It is easy to speak lightly of words, as 
though they were mere idle sound; but an 
opinion or a belief which has once gotten 
itself rightly barricaded behind verbal breast- 
works, will withstand the onslaughts of armies 
and of centuries. Writing about books is, for 
6 



82 THIXGS OF THE MIND. 

the most part, idle writing; for each one must 
discover for himself the book or books he 
needs, and it is sufficient that he know there 
are but a few that are good. Books are saved 
from oblivion by quality of thought and style. 
Without this even the most learned and pro- 
found are soon superseded or forgotten; for 
the learning of one age becomes the ignorance 
of another; and true thoughts badly expressed 
pass into the possession of those who know 
how to give them proper embodiment, just as 
the story becomes his who tells it best. The 
best books are praised by many, read by some, 
and studied by few. The inventor of the 
telephone sets tens of thousands talking to 
one another from a distance, but their talk is 
the same old story they have been telling face 
to face these many centuries. Never shall 
mortal make a machine which will teach them 
to think nobler thoughts or to say diviner 
things. If the bodily eye needs much training 
that it may see rightly, distinguish accurately 
among the myriad forms and colors, how shall 
we hope, without discipline and habitual 
effort, to acquire justness of intellectual view, 
ability to see things as they are.? 

A man's accidents, such as wealth or posi- 
tion, may give him importance while he is 
alive; but once he is dead, only what was part 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 83 

of himself, as his genius or his virtue, can 
make him interesting. The craving for re- 
cognition should be resisted as we resist an 
appetite for strong drink. To look for praise 
or place is to work in the spirit of a hireling. 
That alone is good for me which gives me 
freedom and opportunity to lead my own life, 
to upbuild the being which is myself. Since 
human power is limited, that which is spent 
in one direction lessens the amount which 
might be used in another. The nerve force 
the sensualist consumes in indulgence, the 
higher man evolves into thought and love. 
Favor rather than opposition hinders develop- 
ment of mind and character. If self culture 
is our aim, let us be thankful for foes, and 
deem ourselves fortunate when the world per- 
mits us to pass unnoticed. Should God lead 
me to a higher world and offer whatever I 
might crave, I should ask for the clearest 
intellectual insight and the purest love. 

Half of all that is printed is harmful, and of 
the remainder more than half is superfluous. 
It is a problem whether the daily newspaper 
will not eventually submerge both intellect 
and conscience. They who live for truth and 
love should renounce all hope of financial, 
political, and social success; for those whose 
home is in higher spheres are not recognized, 



84 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

and should not care to be recognized, by the 
dwellers in lower worlds. There is a kind of 
talent which needs encouragement, but it is of 
the sort which is hopelessly inferior. A God- 
like power thrives most when men are heedless 
of its presence; and the best work has been 
done by those who received little praise while 
they were living, and who cared little what 
should be said of them when dead. Where the 
individual dwindles, man becomes, not more 
and more, but less and less; for man exists 
only in the individual. Let not thy study be 
to provide for thy present wants or whims, but 
to do the absolute best God has made thee 
capable of doing. Talent is inborn. It un- 
folds itself, however, only under certain con- 
ditions. To provide these conditions is the 
business of the educator, and whatever else he 
may do is harmful. He who has gained a 
higher point of view, looks with a kind of 
hopeless sadness upon those whose eyes are 
blinded by ignorance or passion. 

In whoever is destined to achieve distinction 
the spirit of discontent lives like a god. *' To 
accustom mankind, " says Joubert, " to pleasures 
which depend neither upon the bodily appe- 
tites nor upon money, by giving them a taste 
for the things of the mind, seems to me the 
one proper fruit which nature has meant our 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 85 

literary productions to have." Early ripeness, 
long life, and youthful minded old age are the 
conditions required for the best development 
of man's powers. They who see things in a 
new light influence opinion, but mere makers 
of syllogisms and propounders of arguments 
speak and write to no purpose. To have 
value, knowledge must be intelligence, and not 
merely erudition. It is for the mind, not the 
mind for it. 

The philosopher, poet, or man of science who 
says he has no time to waste in getting rich, 
speaks, in the opinion of the crowd, sheer 
nonsense, though he simply expresses the 
generally received truth, that what we are is 
of more importance than what we possess. 

As distance seems to bring the stars close 
together, so in remote epochs great men and 
great deeds appear to stand thicker. This is 
but a form of the illusion which perspective 
always creates, and to which we must also 
attribute the prevalent notion that in ancient 
times heroic virtue was less rare than in our 
own. "In cheerfulness," says Pliny, "lies the 
success of our studies." We live only as we 
energize. Energy is the mean by which our 
faculties are developed, and a higher self- 
activity is the end at which all education 
should aim. Whatever else may succeed with 



86 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

US, we all fail in love; and in this lies the 
essential sadness of life. He who cannot 
perform noble deeds will not be able to write 
in a noble style. He who takes interest in a 
pugilist rather than in a philosopher or a poet 
is as though he were a dog or a cock. The 
lack of money may cause discomfort, but the 
lack of intelligence makes us poor, the lack of 
virtue makes us vulgar. Lack of money may 
be supplied, lack of soul never. The money 
we owe enslaves us, the money we own cor- 
rupts us. Whoever can influence men should 
strive to make them more courageous, more 
enduring, more hopeful, simpler, more joyful. 

"Books," says Emerson, "are the best of 
things, well used; abused, among the worst. 
What is the right use.^ What is the one end 
which all means go to effect.? They are for 
nothing but to inspire." 

There is no phrase more suggestive than this 
of the Gospel, — to "throw pearls to swine." 
This is what the makers of literature have 
been doing from the beginning; and that 
which still survives as literature is what a few 
heavenly minds have picked up from beneath 
the hoofs of the herd, whose uplifted snouts 
pleaded for swill, not for thought. Descartes 
and Spinoza, like Plato and Aristotle, hold 
that blessedness consists in knowing in so 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 8/ 

living a way that to know is to admire, to 
love, to be filled with peace and joy. A man 
of genius is like a barbarous conqueror; he 
slays the victims he despoils, and so what 
he steals seems never to have belonged to 
others. 

"The philosopher," says St. Evremonde, 
"devotes himself, not to the most learned writ- 
ings to acquire knowledge, but to the most 
sensible to strengthen his understanding. At 
one time he seeks the most elegant to refine 
his taste, at another the most amusing to 
refresh his spirits." Whoever reads to good 
purpose seeks to place himself at the writer's 
point of view. He reads for inspiration and 
knowledge, not to find fault. There are many 
whose view of education is that it is a process 
of taming, like the domestication of animals. 
They strive to subdue the child and make him 
pliable to another's will; and when he has 
become thoroughly tame, they think he is well 
educated. A tame horse, however, if we 
consider its own good, is inferior to one that 
is wild; and whoever or whatever is overcome 
and made subject is weakened and dispirited. 
Whatever we teach boys, girls should be 
taught the science and art of education itself; 
for three-fourths of them will become mothers, 
and education is a mother's chief business, in 



88 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

which if she fails, schools and other agencies 
are powerless to form true men and women. 

What gives pleasure is of little moment, 
what gives power and wisdom is all-important. 
The degenerate seek ease and comfort ; the 
strong love adventure and danger, hardship 
and labor. To lead a moral and intellectual 
life is to make one's self, physically even, 
attractive. 

When the discerning perceive that an author 
addresses himself to a circle, a party, or a 
class, they care not what he says; knowing 
that if it were worth writing, he would utter 
it simply from his inner being, and without 
thought of impressing others. A book thrown 
in our way by chance, an acquaintance made 
by accident, changes the whole course of life. 
We are strong when we follow our own talent, 
weak when another's leads us. Whoever is 
made free frees himself. This is the mean- 
ing of the Gospel phrase : " Ye shall know the 
truth, and the truth shall make you free." 
Another may break down prison walls and 
strike off fetters, but this liberating truth each 
one must teach himself, or never know it at 
all. Duration rather than intensity of high 
and passionate feeling makes the man of 
genius. The human race is so poor in men of 
real intellectual force that when it finds one 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 89 

it receives him gladly, whatever his defects 
or perverseness may be. Whoever impels to 
high thinking gives pleasure, and of a nobler 
kind than that which a fair scene or rich wine 
or delightful company can give. Why should 
the American who is most alive be able simply 
to make the most money } Why should he not 
think the highest thought, feel the deepest 
love.-* Sensation lies at the root of thought. 
We really know only what experience, suffer- 
ing, and labor have wrought into our very 
being. Hence the young have no true or deep 
knowledge. 

In educating, as in walking, we have an end 
in view. In educating this end is an idea, — 
the idea of human perfection; and to develop 
and make plain this ideal is more important than 
any of the thousand questions with which our 
pedagogical theorists are occupied ; for to say 
we live by faith, hope, love, and imagination is 
but a way of saying that we live only in the 
light of ideals. A student wrote this over his 
door: "Who enters here does me honor, who 
stays away gives me pleasure." "To read to 
good purpose," says Matthew Arnold, "we 
must read a great deal, and be content not to 
use a great deal of what we read." 

A cultivated mind entertains all ideas and 
all facts with attention, just as a polite and 



90 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

brave man is gracious to all comers. The 
painter studies the body in nude models. Let 
the thinker, if he would know the value of his 
thought, strip it of verbal ornament. The 
showy dress of words but hides the lack of 
truth, as a fine phrase makes its content credi- 
ble. "Not more than one in one hundred 
thousand of the books written in any lan- 
guage," says Schopenhauer, "forms a real and 
permanent part of literature." 

In literature is preserved the essence of the 
intellectual, moral, and imaginative life of the 
best minds. A good book may easily be more 
interesting than its author; for there we find 
pure and refined what in him was commingled 
with baser matter. I cannot read all books, 
but I can read many; and the writers of the 
many I read have read all that is worth read- 
ing. The journalist is an alarmist. His 
newspaper sells in proportion to the excite- 
ment he succeeds in creating. Wars, disasters, 
panics, famines, plagues, outrages, scandals, 
form the element in which he thrives. His 
readers lose the power to remember, to think. 
They lose the sense for simple truth and 
beauty, for proportion and harmony. Like 
the readers of cheap novels, they become 
callous, and can be roused to momentary 
attention only by what is startling or mon- 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 9 1 

strous. The journalist seeks what will make 
immediate impression; a real mind looks to 
truth and to permanent results. 

No one actually holds within his memory one 
ten-thousandth part of the information con- 
tained in a book such as the British Ency- 
clopaedia; and he who knows most of the 
Encyclopaedia is probably a man in whom 
there is little spontaneity, little of that mental 
quality which gives one's thought personal, 
that is real, charm and worth. "Truth that 
has been merely learned," says Schopenhauer, 
" is like an artificial limb, a false tooth, a 
waxen nose; it adheres to us only because it 
has been put on." 

The right to punish implies the duty to teach 
and educate. Once we have gained insight 
into life's meaning, we see how nearly all 
men, like hounds astray, are following scents 
which lead nowhere. He who writes with 
care day by day will learn at least how to say 
things. For the education of men, which is 
the highest human work, one heroic, loving 
and illumined soul is worth more than all the 
money-endowments. How poor are they who 
have only money to give! May it not be a 
consciousness of the small value of what they 
can bestow that hardens the hearts of the 
rich ? They who give money give like those 



92 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

who give food ; they who give truth and love 
give like God. 

As the miser lives ever, in thought, with 
his gold, the lover with his beloved, so the 
student lives always with the things of the 
mind, with what is true and fair and good. 
High purpose and the will to labor mark those 
who are predestined to distinction. To have 
knowledge but no skill, no ability to do any 
useful thing, avails nothing. Herein lies the 
defect of our education : we are taught every- 
thing except how to work wisely, bravely, and 
perseveringly; how to strive not for money 
and place, but for wisdom and virtue. Learn- 
ing without faculty leaves us impotent, and 
may easily render us ridiculous. In each soul 
there is a world in embryo, and the teacher's 
business is to help it to be born. To interest 
the young in themselves, in the world that is 
in and around them, that they may realize that 
its implications are divine, is a chief part 
of education. The best help is that which 
makes us reverent, self-active and indepen- 
dent. Work reveals character. We know 
what a man is when we know, not what his 
opinions and beliefs are, but what he does or 
has done. Our highest aspirations reveal our 
deepest needs. Better be one whom men hate 
than one whose ideal is good digestion, good 
clothes, and general comfortableness. 



VIEWS OF EDUCATION. 93 

The true educator strives to draw forth and 
strengthen the sense for truth and justice, and 
to develop a taste for the purer and nobler 
pleasures of life. His aim is to make men 
good and reasonable, not to make them smart 
and eager for possession or indulgence. The 
discipline of sorrow, of sorrow of a great and 
worthy kind, has a high educational value. 
More than anything else it purifies the sources 
of life and forms character. Every choice 
spirit seeks some fortress, some soul-sanctuary, 
where he may live for truth and God, far from 
the crowd who neither know nor love/i You 
are not I, your good is not mine. Go forward, 
then, and prosper; your gain can never be my 
loss. We thoroughly understand only what 
we have outgrown. Intellectual progress is an 
approach to truer estimates of values. A man 
is what he is and who he is, not by virtue 
of wealth or office, but by the quality of his 
thought and life. "Thinking and doing, 
doing and thinking," says Goethe, "is the 
sum of all wisdom, — so recognized and prac- 
tised from the beginning, but not understood 
by every one." 



CHAPTER IV. 

PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION. 

Godlike is the physician who is a philosopher. — Hippocrates. 
The philosopher should end with medicine, the physician 
begin with philosophy. — Aristotle. 

AS the whole science of arithmetic is con- 
tained in the multipHcation table, so the 
whole significance of life is summed up for each 
one in his table of values. What has worth and 
what is the relative worth of desirable things? 
This is the primal question for whoever has the 
will to exert himself; for as he feels and thinks 
on this subject, so will he act. To mistake here 
involves the drifting of his whole existence away 
from what is best, from what is true, good, and 
fair. At first thought it would seem that there 
are certain fundamental notions as to what is 
desirable, upon which all agree. Who can doubt, 
we may ask, that it is better to be than not to be, 
that what has life is being in a higher sense than 
what is inanimate, and that the degree of worth 
in living things is measured by the power and 
quality of life? But there are men who take no 



PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION. 95 

mean rank as thinkers, who call life evil and 
death good, who hold that it is better not to be 
than to be, as there are others who prefer igno- 
rance to knowledge, pleasure to duty, strength 
of body to intellectual power, and material pos- 
sessions to spiritual insight. To some, it seems 
good to have many slaves, many wives, many 
children, while others believe that slavery de- 
grades the owner not less than the owned, that 
one wife is more than enough, and that desire 
for children, the result of instinct and not of 
rational motives, is felt most by those who think 
least. As men become more intelligent and 
civilized, they argue, they grow less able and 
less willing to have offspring, and he who knows 
what Hfe is, if reason controls him, should be as 
unwilling to transmit it as to take it. 

To most men, wealth and power, position and 
fame appear to be supremely desirable, and yet 
there are many who are persuaded that to the 
nobler sort of life, riches and honor and place 
and renown are hindrances. Of the worth of 
friendship, as of that of the love of women, oppo- 
site views are taken. Civilization is decried as 
a state of degeneracy; art, as at once the result 
and the cause of an effeminate temper; and 
rehgion, as the chief source of the worst evils 
which have afflicted mankind. Thus widely do 
we differ as to the value of things. The chief 



96 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

barrier between men is not wealth, or rank, or 
creed; it is opposition of life and thought; for 
these determine the worth of all things. The 
mind is the creator of interest and consequently 
of value. 

See yonder youth and maid how wrapped they are 

each in the other ; 
See yonder two white lambs that gently push 

their heads together. 

I look and feel a momentary pleasure, but if 
there is interest, I create it by putting thought 
in what, in the lovers and the lambs, is but sen- 
sation. Life is interpreted by thought, but it is 
enrooted in faith, which, with the aid of knowl- 
edge, supplies the element of value in every 
sphere of human action, since that alone seems 
good to us in which we genuinely believe, whether 
it be money or wisdom, pleasure or power, the 
world or God. What is anything worth to him 
who believes in nothing, who is indifferent to all 
things? What is aught but as it is esteemed? 
Faith is wedded to desire, and desire gives value. 
What we yearn for seems to be more truly 
part of ourselves than what we possess. Hence 
youth with its longings is richer than age with 
its millions. Hence religion which makes us 
conscious of our infinite needs, and utters itself 
in ceaseless prayer and sacrifice, is man's chief 
consoler and joy-bringer. Hence genius which 



PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION: 97 

feels itself akin to all things, and is impelled to 
identify itself with all things, is beatified by its 
own spirit. Hence faith, hope, and love, the 
triune fountainhead of boundless desire and 
aspiration, are the springs of life upwelling from 
central depths of being. The divine joy and 
goodness which the young find in life are there 
in truth, and they in whom reflection or experi- 
ence has destroyed this vital faith, have lost the 
view of things as they are. Fortunate is the 
orator who finds an audience whom the all-hoping 
soul of youth persuades, with an eloquence whose 
secret words cannot convey, to trust in whatever 
is high, or holy, or excellent; and still more for- 
tunate is he when those who listen are drawn 
by an inner attraction to devote their lives to a 
profession in which to be ignorant is to be 
criminal. 

Belief in the good of knowledge is not the 
weakest of the bonds which unite the members 
of the learned professions ; for whether our 
special study be theology, or law, or medicine, 
or pedagogy, that which determines our place 
and power to render service is knowledge, and 
the skill that comes of knowledge. It is expected 
and required of us that we be the wise men 
among the people, able to counsel, to guide, and 
to defend them wherever their vital interests are 
at stake. Our callings have their origin in human 



98 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

miseries. Disease, folly, sin, and ignorance make 
physicians, lawyers, priests, and educators pos- 
sible and necessary; and the infirmities upon 
which they thrive are so related that he who 
ministers to one ministers to all. Another bond 
is thus woven into the very constitution of the 
liberal professions. Disease, in innumerable in- 
stances, is the child of folly, sin, and ignorance ; 
folly, the child of sin, ignorance, and disease; 
sin, the child of ignorance, disease, and folly ; 
while ignorance may be said to be the common 
mother of all our miseries. Were there no dis- 
ease, there would be no physicians ; were there 
no folly, there would be no lawyers ; were there 
no sin, there would be no priests ; were there no 
ignorance, therewould be no teachers. It is, then, 
our unenviable lot to live, like moral cannibals, 
on the misfortunes and weaknesses of our fellow- 
men ; and it is but natural that we should be 
made immortal themes of exhaustless satire and 
abuse. What a general blessing have profes- 
sional men not been to the whole literary tribe ! 
The priest's love of ease and power, the law- 
yer's cunning and dilatoriness, the physician's 
wise look, and his blunders hidden by the grave, 
are subjects which must find a ready response in 
the general heart, since books are full of them. 
Queen Mab tickles the parson's nose, as he lies 
asleep, with a tithe-pig's tail, and he dreams of 



PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION. 99 

another benefice ; she drives over the lawyer's 
fingers, and he dreams of fees. His clients are 
like flies in the spider's web. 

'' When once they are imbrangled 
The more they stir, the more they 're tangled." 

Doctors themselves, I imagine, more than 
half agree with Macbeth, when he bids them 
throw physic to the dogs, for he '11 none of it. 

" Physicians mend or end us 
Secundum artem ; but although we sneer 
In health, when sick we call them to attend us, 
Without the least propensity to jeer." 

If not witty ourselves, like Falstaff, why should 
we object to being the cause of wit in others? 
We are sure to have our revenge, for men will 
still be fools, and sinners, and invalids, and how- 
ever much they mock, they will call us in the 
hour of need. It is vain to warn them against 
priests, lawyers, and doctors, — they will never 
be wise and never be well. 

In sober truth, we are the best friends of man, 
for we are all ministers of health, without which 
life is hardly a blessing. Whatever may con- 
tribute to the bodily well-being and perfection 
of man is the physician's concern ; whatever may 
secure individual rights and promote social jus- 
tice is the lawyer's ; the priest's is the soul's 
health, morality, and righteousness. They all 
strive for stronger, purer, nobler life, in the 



lOO THINGS OF THE MIND. 

body, in the conscience, in the soul, in the indi- 
vidual, in the State, in the Church. Their mis- 
sion is high and holy, it is Godlike, and to fulfil 
it rightly, the best gifts thoroughly cultivated 
are not too great. That which they, day by day 
with ceaseless efforts, labor to accomplish is the 
prophet's vision, the philosopher's truth, and the 
poet's dream ; and what else do patriots, states- 
men and men of science long for than the kind 
of life which it is the business of the learned 
professions to foster? To these high callings 
no servile spirit should belong. By the common 
consent of the civilized world they are denomi- 
nated liberal, for only the free and enlightened 
mind can grasp their significance or enter with 
right disposition upon the work they involve. 
Not pleasure or wealth or the love of ease or 
any lower motive may open the door of the 
temple of knowledge and religion ; but they who 
seek admission should feel that they devote their 
lives to sacred tasks, in which the more they 
succeed the more shall they have to labor and 
endure. They should have youth's deep faith in 
the good of life, and be willing to deny them- 
selves, and to persevere through years in the 
work of self-culture that they may make them- 
selves worthy to become the bearers of the best 
gifts to their fellow-men. The prolonged infancy 
and childhood of the human offspring is nature's 



PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION. 1 01 

compulsion to education, and the noblest minds 
are conscious of an inward impulse driving them 
to become day after day, self-surpassed. The 
doctrine that the individual dwindles, while the 
race is more and more, they do not accept, for 
they know the race exists only in individuals, 
the highest of whom give it wisdom and distinc- 
tion, glory and strength. From their early years 
they hear the appeal of the unseen powers whis- 
pering to them : Be men, not merchants, or 
lawyers, or doctors, or priests, but Godlike 
beings ; not means, but ends, for the universe 
exists that perfect men and women may be 
formed. An inner voice teaches them that man 
lives to grow, to upbuild his being, and that effort 
is the source of all improvement, being nothing 
less than the hold the finite has upon the infinite. 
Before they begin the special studies which are 
to fit them more immediately for the calling they 
have chosen, they will have gotten a liberal 
education ; for the mind is the instrument with 
which they shall work, and since the interests to 
be committed to them are of paramount, nay, su- 
preme moment, this instrument can never be too 
perfect. Is it conceivable that awkward, undisci- 
plined intellects should rightly apprehend the 
deep and complex sciences which are the sub- 
ject matter of the learned professions ? 

A liberal education is not so much knowledge 



102 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

as it is a preparation for knowledge. It is open- 
ness and flexibility of mind, delight in the things 
of the intellect, justness of view, candor, patience, 
and reasonableness. It has a moral as well as 
an intellectual value. It is discipline of mind 
and of character. It opens higher worlds than 
those the senses reveal. It offers nobler aims 
than the pursuit of material things; it liberates 
from sordid views and the mercenary mind, and 
thus establishes the primary condition of genu- 
ine success ; for each one's worth as well as the 
worth of what he does should be estimated by 
the spirit in which he lives and strives. If he 
take no delight in his work, but labor solely 
with a view to profit, it is a mere chance if he 
do not become a criminal. A liberal education 
does for the mind what wholesome food and 
healthful exercise do for the body, — it gives 
vigor, energy, endurance, ease, and grace. As 
the athlete performs feats which the untrained 
can only admire, so cultivated intellects accom- 
plish what ruder minds cannot understand or 
appreciate. There is a quickness of perception, 
a clearness of view, a soundness of judgment, a 
power of discrimination and analysis, a sureness 
of tact, and a refinement of taste, which educa- 
tion alone can give. It bestows also a sense of 
freedom, that inspires courage and confidence, 
which are elements of strength, whatever the 



PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION. IO3 

undertaking be; while the faculty to think, to 
reason and compare, the ability to see things as 
they are, which it confers, gives those who have 
received a liberal education manifest advantages 
over others in the prosecution of scientific and 
professional studies. Their knowledge is more 
accurate, it is more intimately related to life, 
their mental grasp is firmer, their view wider 
and more profound. They escape the narrow- 
ing influence of purely professional studies, 
which, if unhindered, would make us mere theo- 
logians or lawyers or physicians, whereas it is 
our business to unfold our being on every side 
and to make ourselves alive in many directions. 
Division of labor makes everything cheap, — 
man first of all; and the increasing tendency 
to specialization may have the effect, not only 
to lower the standard of professional life, but to 
interfere with the development in the professions 
of strong, many-sided personalities, interesting 
in themselves, and lending dignity to their call- 
ings ; who, while they are masters in their sev- 
eral departments, are none the less at home in 
the whole world of human interests and specu- 
lations. The man of liberal education is a life- 
long student, and the habitual student is rarely 
content to think and read but in a single direc- 
tion ; for he soon perceives that all kinds of 
knowledge are related, and that he who would 



104 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

acquire the full and free use of his intellectual 
faculties must exercise himself in all the fields 
of thought. While he acquaints himself with 
the best that has been thought and written, he 
will keep pace with the progress of research and 
speculation in his own profession, for, in the 
midst of a thousand cares and duties, he will 
still find time to read and meditate. He will be 
a thoroughly informed theologian, lawyer, or 
physician, but he will also be an accomplished 
man, whose speech and behavior will help to 
refine and exalt the society in which he moves. 
He will hold his opinions with firmness and he 
will express them with ease and grace. His 
principles will be pure, his sympathies large and 
his religion unfeigned. A good friend and a 
pleasant companion, he will be most happy 
when he is permitted to hold communion with 
the great minds of all ages, or to retire into the 
world of his own contemplations. To him no 
company is so pleasant as that of true and 
beautiful thoughts; for they are forever fresh 
and invigorating, and like well-bred people, if 
we begin to tire, they take their leave, till the 
right moment return. His professional experi- 
ence will reveal to him much of the weakness 
and miseries of men, but his sympathy and love 
will thereby be purified and strengthened. 

While I thus treat of professional life and 



PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION. IO5 

education from a general point of view, and 
somewhat in the spirit of an idealist, I do not 
lose sight of the occasion which calls forth this 
discourse. As a minister of religion I should 
and do take a genuine interest in whatever con- 
cerns the science and art of healing. The first 
priest was the first physician, as well as the first 
lawgiver and ruler, for government, literature, 
science, and art all had their cradle in the tem- 
ple of religion, and were nourished by faith in 
the unseen powers. Asclepios, the gentle arti- 
ficer of freedom from pain, was a son of the 
gods, and from him Hippocrates, the father of 
medicine, claimed descent. To the religious 
spirit in which he followed his profession, the 
oath he prescribed to all physicians that they 
would pass their lives and practice their art in 
purity and holiness, bears witness. To come to 
what concerns us more nearly, the Founder of 
the Christian faith came not merely as a teacher 
of divine truth and a savior of the soul, but he 
came also as a healer of bodily infirmity, and in 
much of what is recorded of him the restoration 
of health is a striking feature. At the sight of 
suffering his sympathies awaken, and care for 
the sick is one of the virtues he especially 
emphasizes. The first definite duty he imposed 
upon his disciples was that of travelling about 
to announce the Kingdom of God and to heal 



I06 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

those afflicted with disease. Of the four who 
have left record of his Hfe one was a physician. 
There may be higher things than the alleviation 
of pain, but there is no more genuine test of 
love for men, which is a fundamental principle 
in the hfe and teachings of Christ. The spirit 
of humanity which he more than all others has 
awakened and strengthened, is nowhere better 
exemplified than in the medical profession as it 
exists in the world to-day. The true physician 
waits as a servant upon the miseries of man ; 
like a soldier at his post, he stands ready to 
bring relief. Neither darkness of night, nor 
storm, nor contagion, nor pestilence, nor the field 
of carnage can deter him when duty calls. His 
service is at the command of rich and poor, and 
his mind is ever busy with thoughts that bear 
on the prevention or cure of disease, for with 
him preventive medicine takes precedence of 
the curative. In this he obeys the law of Chris- 
tian charity, for, if to minister to the sick is 
Christlike, to forestall disease by searching into 
its causes and discovering how they may be 
removed is not less a godlike thing. They who 
throw themselves as consolers and servants into 
the midst of pest-stricken populations are God's 
men and women ; so also are they who teach 
us how pestilence and contagion may be ex- 
cluded. Worthy of praise and imitation are the 



PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION. lO'J 

builders and endowers of hospitals for the poor, 
but more worthy yet are the educators who show 
the people how disease may be avoided, and the 
philanthropists and statesmen who place them 
in health-giving surroundings. From what un- 
imaginable sufferings has not the knowledge of 
the prophylactic and therapeutic properties of 
quinine saved mankind? To what countless 
millions has not Jenner come with his vaccine, 
bringing, like a God, immunity from one of the 
most terrible diseases? Who can estimate the 
mitigation of pain and the saving of life brought 
about by the use of anaesthetics? 

Aseptic and antiseptic treatment has opened 
a new era in surgery, enabling the operator to 
use the knife with full confidence of success in 
cases which for centuries had been thought 
desperate. Pasteur, as competent judges be- 
lieve, has found a preventive of hydrophobia, 
and why shall we not look forward to the day 
when the bacilli which cause tuberculosis, chol- 
era and other parasitic diseases shall be under 
the control of the physician? 

It has been shown plainly enough to convince 
the most sceptical that organisms wholly invisi- 
ble without the aid of the highest magnifying 
powers, cause each its particular infectious dis- 
ease. Men of science have succeeded in culti- 
vating these bacilli like plants in a garden. 



T08 THINGS OF THE MIND, 

They keep them in glass tubes on the shelves 
of their laboratories and handle them with 
impunity, and we can not believe that our con- 
trol over the infinitely small will stop here. 
When once the cause of disease is clearly known, 
the human mind which weighs the stars and 
counts the pulsations of light, will find a remedy. 
The men who are striving to do this work, often 
in silence and obscurity, remote from the praise 
and approval of the world, are carrying on a 
warfare in comparison with which the noisy 
battles of history are as insignificant as the 
shouts and stone-throwlngs of a rabble. They 
stand face to face with disease and death in 
their most secret lurking-places, from which, 
from the beginning of the world, they have 
made assault on life. Of old it was afifirmed 
that man's life is a warfare, and the saying has 
come down to us who find a deeper and more 
important truth in it than the ancients ever 
suspected. Apart from the world-wide struggle 
for existence, in the large and historic sense, 
each living organism is a battlefield. Consider 
for a moment the wonderful part which the 
white corpuscles of the blood play in defence of 
life. Their work may be studied with the aid 
of a microscope in the web of a frog's foot, in 
which irritation has been caused, as the bacillus 
of disease causes irritation. When the inflamma- 



PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION. lOQ 

tion begins, the white corpuscles lag behind and 
hug the sides of the veins and arteries ; a little 
later we may observe them passing through the 
walls of the blood-vessels into the surrounding 
tissues, and again returning into their natural 
channels, from which they had issued to attack 
the organism that had set up the irritation, and 
to destroy it or themselves to be destroyed. 
These white corpuscles, then, which are found 
in the blood in the ratio of one to five hundred 
of the red particles, move with the life-bearing 
fluid, like soldiers who guard a convoy and are 
always ready to repel the enemy. Hence they 
are called phagocytes, devourers of disease- 
producing germs. These protoplasmic soldiers 
are the wisest medical teachers, and the whole 
profession is beginning to learn the lesson they 
inculcate, that the best treatment is warfare on 
the cause of disease. The phagocyte plainly 
tells us also that the cause of disease is not an 
imaginary entity or influence, but a real being 
which, in many cases at least, is a living 
organism. 

There is of course no real break in the history 
of medicine, but from the time of Hippocrates 
to the beginning of the nineteenth century, 
though several important discoveries were made, 
and new remedies and modes of treatment of 
more or less value were introduced, the progress 



no THINGS OF THE MIND. 

of medical science was altogether unsatisfac- 
tory. Old theories gave place to new, and new 
methods were substituted for the old, but the 
gain was not great. The revival of the study of 
the writings of Hippocrates and Galen, in the 
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, did not pro- 
duce any important reform. Physicians con- 
tinued to rely upon authorities rather than on 
facts. The discovery of the circulation of the 
blood, made by Harvey in the early part of the 
seventeenth century, was a significant event, but 
it produced no immediate effect on the practice 
of medicine. Faith in the old dogmas was 
weakened, but belief in the good or necessity of 
schools and systems survived. The names of 
Sydenham, Boerhaave, Hoffman, Stahl, Haller, 
Cullen, Brown and Rush will retain a place in 
the history of medicine, but their contributions 
to the science and art of healing have little 
historic significance. The Vienna school of the 
eighteenth century deserves recognition for its 
insistence upon the necessity of carefully study- 
ing the facts of disease during life and after 
death ; and also because Avenbrugger, a Vienna 
physician, was the first to employ percussion as 
a means of diagnosing pulmonary affections. 
Thus we approach the modern school of medi- 
cine, in which the methods of physical science 
are adopted, while little importance is given to 



PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION, III 

theories or to hypotheses, unless when they are 
used as guides in the search after facts. Start- 
ing with the assumption that vital phenomena, 
both in health and disease, conform to laws and 
are therefore intelligible, the new school, with 
the aid of new instruments, has created new 
sciences, which have a more or less direct bear- 
ing upon the practice of medicine. The study 
of organic types, microscopic anatomy, ex- 
perimental pathology and therapeutics, have 
brought knowledge where ignorance had pre- 
vailed; while auscultation, percussion, micro- 
scopy, physiological chemistry, the thermometer, 
the ophthalmoscope, the auricular speculum and 
the laryngoscope enable the physician to make 
diagnosis certain in cases in which hitherto he 
had been left to surmise. The increasing number 
of known parasitical organisms, which are the 
causes of disease, permit him to substitute real 
for imaginary etiological entities. His view is 
clearer, his judgment sounder, his treatment 
more effective for he moves in an intelligible 
world. His feet are in the way which has led 
to all the marvellous achievements of physical 
science. In the presence of forces which are 
pregnant with life or death, he no longer fights 
blindly, or with the fatal confidence of the 
empiric. If he have theories they rest on the 
basis of facts carefully observed and accurately 



112 TIIIXGS OF THE MIND. 

determined. Medicine henceforth is so guided, 
surrounded and protected by science, that it can 
no longer drift with the currents and counter- 
currents of opinion and speculation. The great- 
ness and worth of the present age lie in its 
intellectual activity rather than in its material 
progress. There is in it a mental stimulus as 
strong as that which impelled the Greeks of the 
age of Pericles, to produce, in every sphere of 
thought and action, the works that still remain 
as an exhaustless source of inspiration. The 
discovery of America is unimportant and com- 
monplace when compared with the discoveries 
made by scientific investigators. We live now 
not merely in a new world, but in new worlds, 
whose boundaries are enlarging, whose secrets 
are ever revealing themselves to patient seekers. 
In the heavens and on the earth we see things 
never before beheld by the eye of man. The 
impulse of this movement is necessarily felt by 
the learned professions. The light which has 
been thrown upon the past, upon the earliest 
struggles of mankind to attain a human kind of 
existence, upon the evolution of languages and 
customs, upon the primitive conceptions of right, 
of duty and of law, has made possible a science 
of sociology which gives us a larger and pro- 
founder view of the sphere of man's life. Biology 
interprets the problems of psychology and psy- 



4 



PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION. I13 

chology provides methods for pedagogy. The 
comparative study of rehgions, the more com- 
prehensive grasp of the history of philosophic 
systems, the criticisims of the Sacred Writings 
with the aid of philology, anthropolgy and 
ethnology, the more accurate analysis of the 
elements of thought and the juster appreciation 
of the value and import of knowledge itself, 
have opened new realms to all who love the 
things of the mind, and, first of all, to those 
whose office compels them to deal with the 
problems of the unseen world, with the super- 
natural, which is God and the soul. In none of 
the professions has the intellectual movement of 
the age produced such wholesome and satis- 
factory results as in medicine. In law and the- 
ology the influence of the scientific spirit tends 
to disturb and unsettle, but in medicine it is 
altogether salutary. The modern physician, 
putting aside the old methods as unsuited to the 
study of vital phenomena, no longer seeks to 
know what life is, but regards it merely as a 
natural process, manifesting itself in health and 
disease ; for, if life is health it is also disease, 
since it inevitably tends towards and ends in 
death, though no specific malady should inter- 
vene to hasten the march to the grave. Death 
is the correlative of life, as disease is the cor- 
relative of health. To think the one is to imply 

8 



114 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

the Other. It is the physician's business, then, 
to acquaint himself with the structure and func- 
tions of the body in health and disease. With- 
out a knowledge of anatomy and physiology he 
cannot understand disease, which is a deviation 
from the line of normal physiological conditions, 
whether structural or functional. The theory of 
disease, however, is but an idle speculation if it 
lead not to the means of cure ; and hence path- 
ology calls for therapeutics, the theory of reme- 
dies, which is also a science, for nearly every 
article of the materia medica produces an effect 
on the organism which may be ascertained with 
scientific precision. But when there is question 
of adapting remedies to diseases the wisest phy- 
sicians recognize now more than ever before 
that they enter an obscure region where they 
feel rather than see their way. The best doctors 
give least medicine, and they would give less if 
their patients were not persuaded that the most 
certain way to frighten death is to keep swallow- 
ing poison. The practice of medicine then is 
still, to a great extent, traditional and empirical, 
and however wide and profound the physician's 
knowledge may be, he soon learns that cease- 
less vigilance and attention to innumerable de- 
tails can alone keep him from becoming a 
murderer. Hahnemann and his disciples have 
doubtless rendered service by showing how well 



PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION. II5 

the sick may prosper by taking, at brief inter- 
vals, a sugar pellet or a teaspoonful of water. 

Physicians more and more insist upon the 
importance of regimen and diet, of pure air and 
healthful occupations, upon sufficient sleep and 
rest, upon cleanliness of person and surround- 
ings. They know that, in innumerable instances, 
disease is the result of careless, ignorant, or 
vicious habits, that function and appetite are 
correlative, and that excessive indulgence per- 
verts the action of the organs which insure the 
harmonious play of the vital forces. They know 
that diseases have definite causes, and that it is 
their business to keep these harmful agencies 
away from those who are well, and to help nature 
to expel them from those who are ill. With the 
increase of knowledge the scope of all the pro- 
fessions is enlarged, and we may now no longer 
look on the physician as simply a healer or an 
assuager of pain. It is his business to under- 
stand the laws of hygiene and sanitation, to 
acquaint himself with climatic conditions, to know 
the kinds of dwelling, clothing and diet, which 
are most favorable to health. He should, in a 
word, as his title of doctor implies, be a teacher. 
The homely proverb that " an ounce of preven- 
tion is better than a pound of cure," which has 
given rise to many maxims and observances 
more or less salutary, he should be able to inter- 



Il6 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

pret and apply In the light of scientific knowl- 
edge. There is no country in which such teach- 
ing is more needed than in our own, or in which 
it might be given with stronger hope of good 
results. America, it is commonly said, is the 
paradise of quacks. Whoever sufficiently adver- 
tises the most worthless nostrum becomes rich ; 
whoever preaches a faith-cure, or a science cure, 
or a magnetic cure, or a blue-glass cure, finds a 
crowd of fools for followers. In the presence of 
the evils caused by this universal quackery, should 
the physician confine himself simply to the treat- 
ment of disease? Is it not his duty as a lover of 
God and of man, as a patriot and a scholar, 
whether he Hves in some isolated hamlet or in a 
great city, to become a public teacher? Who else 
is able to diffuse the knowledge of the laws of 
health and the causes of disease with so much 
authority and ability? To those who should 
object that the popularizing of medical science 
might prove hurtful, I would reply that belief In 
the good of Ignorance or the harmfulness of 
knowledge Is superstition. It is always good to 
know a thing, and the evils which the spread of 
intelligence may cause are not only more than 
counterbalanced by the benefits knowledge con- 
fers, but they tend to correct themselves. If 
ignorance is bliss, it is the bliss of fools or cow- 
ards. When an epidemic threatens there is a 



PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION. 11/ 

general alarm and every precaution is taken to 
exclude it; but the foes of life are always around 
us, lying in ambush. They may lurk in the air 
we breathe, in the food we eat, in the water we 
drink, in the clothing we wear, in the houses we 
live in, in the domestic animals that supply us 
with nourishment or lie about our hearths, on 
the lips of those we love. It is beHeved that we 
all are intelligent enough when our interests are 
at stake, but professional men know how false is 
this tenet. It is a delusion to imagine that the 
multitude think. Their notions of health, of 
right, of religion, are traditional or empirical, 
and to rouse them to self-activity, to observation, 
and reflection, is the best work an enlightened 
mind can perform. '' As a man thinketh in his 
heart, so is he." *' With desolation is the earth 
made desolate, because there is no one who 
thinketh within his heart." To take but a par- 
tial view of the subject, does not daily experi- 
ence teach the physician, the lawyer and the 
priest, that the ignorance, the thoughtlessness 
and indifference of those who seek their help 
are chief impediments to the success of their 
efforts to render service? Those who know 
least, not only misunderstand us, but they are 
also quickest to condemn. In difTusing knowl- 
edge we, of the learned professions, work for 
our own good not less than for the general wel- 



I 1 8 THINGS OF THE MIXD. 

fare. The more intelligent the people are, the 
more responsive they become to the teachings 
of religion and science. Sanitary regulations 
enable civilized nations to exclude or control 
pestilence and contagion. A proper system of 
sewerage seems to have freed Memphis from 
the epidemics which threatened its existence. 
There is not a farm-house, not a cottage in the 
smallest village, in which a kno\vledge of the 
laws of health and of the causes of disease might 
not be made the means of saving human lives. 
How seldom are the heads of families practically 
attentive to the fact that water may be limpid 
and pleasant to the taste and yet carry the germs 
of fatal maladies, which may lurk even, with 
merely suspended vitality, in the clearest ice ! 
How little do they heed the seeds of disease 
which are concealed in damp cellars, in unven- 
tilated rooms, in unaired closets, in carpets, in 
the cushions of chairs, and in the dried sputa of 
the tuberculous ! The land is filled with the 
clamorous denouncers of drunkenness and poi- 
sonous liquors ; but gluttony and badly prepared 
food are the causes of more sickness and misery 
than alcoholic drink, and the army of reformers 
might well reserve part of the abuse they heap 
upon distillers and saloon-keepers for cooks and 
confectioners. My argument against women is 
that they have made us a nation of dyspeptics, 



PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION: II9 

having from time immemorial held undisputed 
sway in the kitchen. Why should we entrust 
the framing of our laws to those who have ruined 
our stomachs? If the food they eat were less 
indigestible men would be more sober. How 
few practically recognize the fact that the func- 
tion the skin performs is as essential to health 
as that of the lungs, or the liver, or the kidneys ! 
Is it not strange that the daily bath should not 
have been made a prescription of religion, since 
cleanliness is next to godliness? At all events 
it is a secret of health and long life, and he is a 
wise physician who makes himself an advocate 
of frequent ablutions. How is it possible to 
like or even respect those who fail to begin each 
day by plunging in the purifying w^ave, or, at 
least, by showering over themselves the clear 
and silvery spray. I should, without much hes- 
itation, give my confidence to a stranger about 
whom I might know little else than that he never 
omits this clean ablution whether the thermome- 
ter register thirty degrees below or ninety de- 
grees above zero ; but with one who does not 
bathe I should not care to have any dealings. 
When I reflect how unwashed many of the heroes 
must have been, from Hector to Bonaparte, with 
the itch, I feel a sense of disillusion ; and when 
I hear Americans praised, what pleases me most 
is the assertion that they bathe more than other 



120 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

people. The bath is not merely hygienic; it is 
a test of civilization. 

Who, so well as the physician, is able to 
impart a knowledge of the laws of heredity in 
their bearing upon disease and immorality? 
Why should foolish young people be permitted 
to marry, when every wise man knows that their 
union will result in a diseased or depraved off- 
spring? The end of marriage is not to console 
weak and sentimental beings, but to provide a 
nobler race. As the life of the soul is enrooted 
in that of the body, the physician is called to 
minister to moral as well as to physical infirmi- 
ties. An American doctor, as you know, claims 
to have discovered a cure for drunkenness ; and 
whether or not his remedies have any efficacy, it 
is a gain to create a wide recognition of the fact 
that dipsomania, in many cases, at least, is a 
disease of the nervous system. Indeed, it seems 
to be altogether probable, that sensual excess 
of whatever kind is as often the result as the 
cause of abnormal physical conditions. If this 
be so, what a world is not opened to the medical 
profession wherein they may labor with the hope 
of being able to confer on their fellow-men not 
bodily health alone, but moral and religious 
blessings as well? 

Whoever belongs to a learned profession 
should have more than professional knowledge 



PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION. 121 

and skill. He should be a representative of the 
science and the culture of his age. Where the 
standard of education for the liberal professions 
is low, the life of the nation cannot be high. 

Human perfection is health of body and soul, 
manifesting itself in the wholesome activity of 
every function and faculty; and in a free coun- 
try the natural stimulators of this activity are 
the lawyer, the physician, and the minister of 
religion. In a democracy, if the people are to 
escape the rule of demagogues and thieves, they 
must have the guidance of superior minds and 
great characters, and where shall they be found 
if not in the liberal professions? As I look 
upon the professions, they are all religious, for 
the end and aim of all of them is to make health, 
justice, and righteousness prevail; and what is 
this but to make the will of God prevail? 

Nor has the physician a baser office than the 
lawyer or the priest. If you cripple the animal 
in man, you clip the angel's wings, for the nobler 
passions draw their life and energy from the 
lower. Many things, we might imagine, are 
dearer than life, — honor, for instance, and truth 
and love ; but in all this, as in whatever else has 
worth, life is present and gives it value. What 
we first demand of professional men whatever 
their special calling, is that they be upright, 
honorable and humane. Character is essential^ 



122 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

for character gives to ability its human quality, 
makes it something we can trust, makes it benefi- 
cent. Thus I complete my earlier thought that 
professional men are united by indissoluble 
bonds. They all alike find their reason for 
being, in the needs and miseries of man ; they all 
minister to his ills, and to all, science, culture, 
and religion supply the means which render 
them able to help. 

A classic writer has said that no better fortune 
can befall a city than to have within its walls 
two or three superior men who agree to work 
together for the common welfare. Who shall 
these two or three superior men be, if not the 
lawyer, the physician, and the minister of reli- 
gion? They are found in every village, and if 
they hold themselves abreast of the science and 
culture of the age, and are also men of character, 
who shall estimate the value of their combined 
influence? It is the nature of science, culture, 
and religion to be communicable, and they who 
diffuse these blessings are the most useful and 
the noblest men. They alone have the right to 
say to their fellows : Provide for us, while we 
make your lives more healthful and pleasant, 
purer and higher. 

But how shall I, a Kentuckian, addressing, for 
the first time in many years, an audience of 
Kentuckians, close without growing conscious of 



PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION. 1 23 

the inspiration of my native air? So long as 
we can recall with pleasure the divine moments 
of our youth, they have not wholly fled, but 
when they come back to us like mocking ques- 
tioners, asking what good or truth or beauty 
there was in the things which once filled us with 
delight, then alas ! youth is gone, forever gone, 
and we have ceased to be ourselves. But oh ! 
I can remember, how in the days of my young 
love, walking in the fields and in the woods that 
lay about my home, I scarcely knew my feet 
touched the ground, but felt that my deep glow- 
ing soul might mount heavenward until it blended 
with the infinite ether, and became immortal 
harmonious pulsings of light and warmth, of joy 
and ecstasy. And later, how often from the 
Cincinnati hills have I looked southward across 
the river and seemed to behold there a fairer 
world, — looked with a longing such as Adam 
may have felt when he turned his eyes towards 
lost paradise. 

Not Syracuse, nor the fair Grecian plain 

Saw coursers swift as thine, sweet home of mine, 
Nor did their sacrificial herds outshine 

Thine own, whose silken flanks are without stain. 

Not there on rarer flowers fell warm, spring rain, 
Nor wore the heavens a beauty more divine, 
Nor purer maidens knelt at holy shrine, 

Nor braver men held warlike death for gain. 



124 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

Thou wantest but the poet to waft thy name 

In rhythmic numbers through the earth and sky, 

Some bard divine, with strong, heroic aim, 
To soar aloft, and utter deathless cry ; 

No muse has touched thy lips with sacred flame, 
To bid the music flow which cannot die. 

Our country is greater than our State ; it fills us 
with larger and nobler thoughts, rouses the con- 
sciousness of a mightier and more far-reaching 
destiny. It is worthy of all homage and love 
for what it has done, and more worthy still 
for what it promises to do. In the presence of 
its boundless energies, aspirations, and sym- 
pathies, the greatest even feel they are dwarfed. 
But our country, in a more intimate sense, is our 
home. He who has no home has no country. 
Patriotism is the spirit of the father's house, 
which is the home of our first love and the one 
to which we turn our last lingering thoughts as 
death's curtain drops. Hence our State comes 
closer to us than our country; it awakens ten- 
derer recollections, weaves about us the tendrils 
of more gentle and fragrant affections. It calls 
forth feelings which glow like the dawn, which 
soften and mellow like the evening sky. It 
blends with memories of the twining arms of 
mothers and fathers, of the warm, unselfish 
devotion of youthful friends. The thought of 
it is interfused with clouds and showers and 
the songs of birds, and all the glories of the 



PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION. 12^ 

unfolding world that accompanied us when we 
were young. 

State rights in the old sense are dead, but 
while the heart of a Kentuckian throbs State 
pride cannot die. How shall we better serve 
our country than by loving our State and doing 
what in us lies to strengthen, purify, and illumine 
the life of its citizens? I ask these learned phy- 
sicians whether a climate which produces the 
noblest breeds of animals, should not be favor- 
able to the noblest breed of men? 

What does our country or our State, what does 
God himself demand of us, but that we grow to 
the full measure of the gifts we have received? 

We render the best service when we make 
ourselves worthy and wise. The faithful servant 
of any cause is not a vulgar boaster, but a true 
striver after the best things. 

When Jenner consulted Dr. Hunter as to 
whether he might not substitute vaccination for 
inoculation, he received the reply : *' Don't think, 
but try." He tried and was successful. The 
right motto, however, is this : " Think and try, 
try and think." Only God can set limits to what 
thought and effort may accomplish. 

I will not exhort, for that would be to reproach, 
I will not proffer advice, for that would be to 
insult, but I will ask whether you know anything 
better than the pursuit of excellence? Equality 



126 THINGS OF THE MIND, 

is a figment of theorists, inequality is nature's 
law. As well not be at all as be common. If 
the equality at which democracy aims means the 
ostracism of superior men, it is a curse; a bless- 
ing, if it means the placing of superior men in the 
lead that they may guide the whole people to 
nobler ideals and higher truth. The best free- 
dom is that which is favorable to the develop- 
ment of high and heroic personalities; the best 
education that which fills us with desire for all 
that is excellent. It is good to be wise and vir- 
tuous, but it is also good to be healthy, strong, 
brave, honorable, fair, and graceful. It is bad to 
be ignorant and sinful, but it is also bad to be 
sick, weak, cowardly, base, ugly, and awkward. 
The striving after perfection, in this large sense, 
blesses and dignifies life. It is a cure for many 
ills; it makes us independent, sufficient for our- 
selves, able to forego praise and patronage; for 
if men seek not our aid, when we have made 
ourselves worthy and capable, the loss is theirs, 
not ours. In pursuing these high aims, we feel 
that we are living for God and our country, and 
we may even deem ourselves fortunate that in 
the early years of our professional career we 
have little else to do than to improve ourselves. 
Happy is he who having found the highest thing 
he is able to do, gives his life to the work. 
Go forth, then, young gentlemen, to perform 



PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION. \2'J 

the noble and humane tasks that will be set you. 
The dawn of a more glorious day has risen upon 
your profession. With Hutten you may exclaim : 
" O blessed age ! Minds awaken, sciences bloom, 
— it is a joy to be alive." To every home you 
visit you shall bring promise of life and health, 
and it will not be your fault, if when you depart, 
you leave not a sense of security and peace. 
So live, that when in the future there shall be 
speech of the worthiest Kentuckians, of you also 
mention shall be made. 



CHAPTER V. 

THEORIES OF LIFE AND EDUCATION. 

That one should be ignorant who has capacity for knowl- 
edge, — this I call tragedy. Carlyle. 

TO write a perfect logic, it would be neces- 
sary to write a perfect treatise on man; 
and a complete theory of education would be 
a complete philosophy of human nature. The 
aim and end of education is to bring out and 
strengthen man's faculties, physical, intel- 
lectual, and moral ; to call into healthful play 
his manifold capacities; and to promote also 
with due subordination their harmonious exer- 
cise; and thus to fit him to fulfil his high 
and heaven-given mission, and to attain his 
true destiny. This would seem to be sim- 
ple enough, and the most opposite schools of 
thought would probably find this statement 
sufficiently large to embrace all their differ- 
ences. Nevertheless the subject of education 
is among the most involved and difficult, as it 
is among those which bear most directly upon 
the highest and holiest interests of mankind. 
The difficulty comes in part from the nature of 
man, which is complex. By thought he belongs 



THEORIES OF LIFE AND EDUCATION. 1 29 

to the world of intellect; by will to the moral 
world: his body makes him brother to the 
sluggish clod; his soul gives him companion- 
ship with angels, and the whole circumstance 
of his existence involves him in the most 
complicated relations with his fellow-beings. 
There is not merely diversity in his endow- 
ments, but contrariety. 

The difficulty increases when we come to 
consider the modifications produced by his sur- 
roundings, — the ever-varying and counteract- 
ing influences which affect his character; and 
yet, in such manner that to assign to each cause 
its proper effect in the total result is impossible. 
Again, the phases of human nature in the same 
individual are so various; the types of collec- 
tive bodies of men, so dissimilar; the features 
of the different national characters, so unlike; 
the effects produced by the same cause upon the 
same person, at different times, so opposite; 
the force of climate, of physical constitution, 
and even of the most trivial accidental circum- 
stances, so marked, and yet so little subject 
to human foresight, — that, taken collectively, 
these facts of themselves seem to show, that 
the question of man's perfect and complete 
education is most intricate and involved. No 
one has a clear knowledge of the history even 
of his own life; of the causes of his progress 
9 



130 THINGS OF THE MIND, 

and retrogression; of the influences that sur- 
rounded the birth of his affections and the 
cradle of his thoughts; of the motives that 
impelled him in this direction or in that. 
Were it possible to see ourselves as we are, 
it would yet be impossible to see clearly the 
causes which have made us what we are. Reli- 
gious faith; the circumstances of birth and 
country; the national institutions and litera- 
ture; the scenes and occupations of childhood; 
habits, whether good or evil, formed in youth; 
these and a thousand other influences, often 
obscure and difficult to trace, go to mould a 
human character. 

There are persons who have been confirmed 
in virtue by having the bitterness of sin and 
the folly of wrong-doing brought home to 
them by sad experience. Others, on the con- 
trary, having once gone astray, never return to 
the right path, but wander and ever wander, 
as though, like our first parents, by a first fall, 
their very nature had been tainted. Who can 
determine the influence of temperament and of 
inherited disposition in any given character.? 
And yet this influence ought to be kept in 
view by the educator. There are natures 
which are strengthened and ennobled by a 
discipline which would weaken and degrade 
those whose endowments are of a different 



THEORIES OF LIFE AND EDUCATION. 131 

kind. What fine discernment and deep in- 
sight are needed to bring out the antagonistic 
faculties without permitting them to clash and 
mutilate one another. The mechanical trade 
which requires the use of the arms alone, 
gives to them an abnormal strength at the ex- 
pense of other members of the body, and thus 
destroys the symmetry and beauty of the human 
frame. Excess of physical exercise diminishes 
the power to think; and great devotion to in- 
tellectual culture has a tendency, not only to 
weaken the body, but to enfeeble the strength 
of moral conviction also, and consequently to 
undermine the basis of all true character. The 
pure intellect is not the sufficient measure of 
the reality of things, and overweening confi- 
dence in its power leads to scepticism. In 
the same way the development of the will and 
of moral consciousness, without corresponding 
mental enlightenment, may beget superstition 
and fanaticism, — "the zeal which is not of 
knowledge." Even in the same faculty there 
is such a diversity of operation, that the edu- 
cation of the intellect or of the conscience 
alone, if we could consider them as isolated, 
would still be most difficult. Imagination is 
developed at the expense of judgment ; the 
power of analysis interferes with the more 
wholesome synthetic operations of the mind; 



132 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

and metaphysical intuition is often found in in- 
verse ratio to common sense. Equilibrium of 
moral character is not more easily produced. 
Considered in themselves, the virtues all con- 
spire to form the perfect man; but the limita- 
tions of human nature prevent this ideal 
harmony; and hence, we find that courage 
interferes with meekness, independence with 
humility, generosity with economy, and confi- 
dence with prudence. The difficulty then is 
manifest, and it is also evident that no system 
can be devised by which a perfect education 
will be secured. And, in fact, to trust greatly 
to any educational mechanism is a dangerous 
illusion. Growth of soul is a spiritual process, 
and can be promoted only by spiritual agen- 
cies. Man, and not the school system, is the 
true educator; and to believe that machinery, 
so powerful within its own sphere, is also able 
to form worthy men and women, is a gross 
superstition. It is none the less true, how- 
ever, that education cannot be carried on 
without the aid of mechanical appliances; and 
hence the necessity of systems, and of attempts 
to realize them. Every system of education 
is based upon a theory, which is derived from 
views concerning man's nature and destiny. 
What is man t What ought he to be .? What 
is his chief business in life.? Has he a destiny 



THEORIES OF LIFE AND EDUCATION. 1 33 

beyond this life? If so, has his conduct in 
this life a bearing upon his future state? 
These are questions which necessarily come 
up for consideration when we attempt to form 
a theory of education; and this theory will 
be shaped by the answers which we accept. 
A system of education is, in fact, the expres- 
sion of a universal philosophy, embracing God, 
man, and nature; and hence, nothing throws 
more light upon the real thought of an age 
than its views upon this subject. An atten- 
tive examination of this matter will not only 
reveal what men really hold to be true, but it 
will also bring out, as in relief, the relative 
importance which they attach to their professed 
beliefs, and the strength of conviction with 
which they hold them. 

In illustration, we will first revert to the 
classic nations, whose religion was a kind of 
nature-worship, and who, though they believed 
in a future existence, looked upon this life as 
alone joyous and happy. Hellenic religion, 
which had its origin in the deification of na- 
ture, found its highest expression in the state, 
whose tutelary divinities were the heroes by 
whom it had been founded or successfully de- 
fended. The state was absolute and supreme; 
and man's first duty and privilege was to be of 
service to his country. The future life was to 



134 THJNGS OF THE MIND. 

be cheerless in the land of shadows and gloom; 
here we drink in the blessed light and air of 
heaven; here is the green earth, here the flow- 
ing waters, here all things invite to joy. 

In accordance with these views of man and 
life, education among the Greeks is patriotic 
and aesthetic. In Sparta, the sole aim is to 
discipline the man into the perfect soldier, 
and at Athens an element of culture and refine- 
ment is added, which is opposed to the war- 
like temper, and the influence of which led to 
the decay of Grecian civilization. The moral 
education which teaches the individual that 
he has duties and responsibilities which tran- 
scend his earthly sphere, and which make him 
accountable to an infinite Being, and an order 
of things which is eternal, was neglected. In 
his noblest work Plato has left us an elaborate 
theory of education, in which he sacrifices 
both the freedom of the individual and the 
rights of the family to the state. 

With the Romans, too, the state was 
supreme; but their character was more serious 
and practical than that of the cheerful and 
pleasure-loving Greeks. And hence, to the 
military training which prepared them to win 
victories for their country, was added a juristic 
education which taught them to watch jealously 
over their rights. When by the conquest of 



THEORIES OF LIFE AND EDUCATION. 135 

Greece, they were brought into contact with 
aesthetic culture, it was again found incom- 
patible with the patriotic and military temper, 
and gradually undermined Roman as it had 
destroyed Grecian civilization. Religion was 
held to be a function of the state, and hence 
religious education was made subordinate and 
auxiliary to the patriotic spirit. Man's first 
and highest duty was to his country; and both 
the individual and the family were sacrificed 
to the state. Hellenism is negatively charac- 
terized by want of moral earnestness. The 
Greek is intellectually active; is eager to see 
things as they are, and finds the most childlike 
and real delight in whatever is beautiful; but 
he has no sense of sin, no awful consciousness 
of God's presence and holiness. He argues 
and disputes; creates philosophy and poetry 
and all the arts, but perishes for having failed 
to perceive the paramount importance of con- 
duct. His desire to see things as they are, 
degenerates into sophistry; his love of the 
beautiful becomes sensuality; and he himself 
remains an eternal example of the impotence 
of the noblest endowments, where there is no 
basis of moral earnestness and religious faith. 

Judaism took, a different view of man, and 
consequently formed a different theory of edu- 
cation. The idea of God, the Creator of all 



136 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

things, and wholly free from the control of 
nature, is the dominant thought of Hebraism. 
Hence man's primal duty is not to deified per- 
sonifications of natural forces, but to God, 
who loves righteousness and hates iniquity; 
whose will is law, and its fulfilment blessed- 
ness; and its violation, which is sin, the only 
evil and supreme misery. Nature is no longer 
independent and self-existent, as in the Greek's 
conception, but a creature, and hence the 
Hebrew is freed from her control, and loves 
and fears God alone. Far from adoring as 
divine the beauty revealed in nature, he flees 
from it as a temptation to idolatry. For a 
similar reason, the state cannot be absolute 
and supreme, and prominence is given to the 
family. Education is patriarchal and reli- 
gious, and is directed chiefly to morality. 

To illustrate still further the manner ''n 
which the theory of education conforms to the 
generally accepted ideal of man, let us turn 
from the consideration of national types to the 
class type. 

In the Middle Ages, the most characteristic 
figures are the knight and the monk. The 
ideal of chivalry is free military service in 
behalf of Christendom, and consequently in 
behalf of all who are wronged and oppressed; 
and among these, woman takes precedence by 



THEORIES OF LIFE AND EDUCATION. 1 37 

virtue of the supreme charm with which she 
appeals to the heart of man. With a view to 
fit him for this noble career, the boy, when he 
was seven years old, began to learn the manner 
of offensive and defensive warfare, on foot and 
on horseback; and between his sixteenth and 
eighteenth year he was raised to knighthood 
by a formal ceremony. His intellectual edu- 
cation was neglected, as having nothing to do 
with the main purpose of his life. His hand 
was to hold the sword and not the pen; and 
even in modern times we find, in proportion 
as the aristocratic spirit is powerful, a want 
of mental flexibility and openness to ideas in 
the nobility. Great development was given 
to the moral qualities which go to form the 
knightly character, especially courage and the 
sense of honor. To be a true knight, was to 
be sans pel LV et sans reproche. The exaggerated 
notion of the worth of courage and the extreme 
sensibility to honor, which were fostered by 
this education, led to the fantastic extrava- 
gancy of knight-errantry, and finally degener- 
ated into vagabondism and quixotism, which 
were the harbingers of the decline and dissolu- 
tion of chivalry. 

/ j Education is the effort to create the ideal 
man, whether absolutely or relatively to special 
vocations, and hence the theory will conform 



138 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

to the received notions concerning this ideal. 
When the first requisite of a perfect man is 
thought to be a strong and athletic body, gym- 
nastic exercise will take precedence of intel- 
lectual training; when the chief good is held 
to be an enlightened mind, mental activity 
will be stimulated, even though the body 
should suffer. Again, each vocation will have 
its special education. The training of the 
soldier will be different from that of the 
lawyer; the physician will not be educated 
like the priest, A fashionable mother, who 
thinks woman's vocation is to please and to be 
pleased, will send her daughter to a school of 
manners, where she will be taught the graces 
and accomplishments of artificial and frivolous 
society. The unlikeness of the different special 
educations arises from the dissimilar ideals of 
the various vocations. Knowledge, whether 
got in a military academy or a commercial 
college, is equally good, but knowledge is not 
education. Habits of thought and of life are 
more than knowledge, and the habits which 
are necessarily acquired during the process of 
education may render knowledge useless or 
hurtful. Every educated man knows much 
that may be to his advantage in any position, 
but in getting this knowledge he has probably 
formed habits which, in avocations different 



THEORIES OF LIFE AND EDUCATION 1 39 

from the one for which he has been trained, 
will be of greater injury than his learning will 
be of help. And hence Roger Bacon's axiom, 
that "knowledge is power," is fallacious. The 
soldier has doubtless learned many things 
which the tradesman ought to know, but he 
has also conceived a notion of life, of honor, 
of the value of courage, as compared with 
other qualities, which, were he forced to 
become a merchant, would prove to be obsta- 
cles to his success. 

"An Oxford education," says Mr. Froude, 
"fits a man extremely well for the trade of 
gentleman. I do not know for what other 
trade it does fit him as at present constituted. 
More than one man who has taken high honors 
there, who has learnt faithfully all that the 
university undertakes to teach him, has been 
seen in these late years breaking stones upon 
a road in Australia." A better stone-breaker 
he would doubtless have been had he never 
studied at Oxford. 

An illustration of the truth upon which I 
am here insisting is furnished by American 
society. A scientific education gives to the 
farmer knowledge which he can put to practical 
use in a thousand ways. Chemistry, zoology, 
botany, physiology, mineralogy, and physics 
generally, may in his hands be converted into 



140 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

money. Shall we not, then, give to every 
farmer a scientific education? No; for the 
habits of thought and sentiment which such 
education creates would render farm life dis- 
tasteful to him; and in fact, we find in our 
own country that even a little education tends 
to drive the young men from tillage of the 
land to the shop life of towns and cities, or, 
worse still, into the learned professions, and 
our agricultural colleges train young men for 
everything except the work for which they 
were organized. 

It can hardly be necessary to insist further 
upon the essential relation which exists between 
the theory of human destiny and the theory of 
human education. The question, what educa- 
tion shall I give my child } can be answered 
only by asking another question, What do you 
desire your child to be and to do.'* The 
accepted end of man determines the aim of 
the educator and prescribes his system. Now 
there are two radically different ways of 
viewing human life, and but two. We may 
consider it as complete in this world, or as 
preparatory to a higher state of existence, and 
corresponding to these opposite views we have 
the secular and the religious theories of edu- 
cation. If there is no future life, a system of 
education based upon the recognition of such 



THEORIES OF LIFE AND EDUCATION. I4I 

life must be false and hurtful. The human 
mind in matters of this kind refuses to accept 
arguments drawn from expediency. To hold 
that there is no God and no immortal human 
soul, and yet to educate men to believe in God 
and in the soul from a notion that such teach- 
ing has a social value, is an outrage. Rather 
let the race perish than be kept alive by an 
infinite lie and worldwide imposture. On the 
other hand, to hold that God is, and that the 
soul is immortal, and yet to refuse to make 
the system of education conformable to this 
belief, is an outrage; and here again the 
human mind refuses to accept arguments drawn 
from expedience. Whether or not this kind 
of education will best serve the cause of what 
is called civilization and progress, is of small 
moment. If God is, He is first. He is all in 
all; if the soul is, it is more than civilization 
and progress. 

These two opposite views of human life are 
in fatal antagonism, and there can be no 
thought of compromise; they give form and 
character to the two hostile armies in the 
eternal warfare between spirit and matter, 
the temporal and the eternal, the Christ and 
the world. That the view whose horizon is 
bounded by man's present life is widely 
accepted, there can be no doubt. It has its 



142 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

philosophy, its ethics, its political economy, 
its sociology, its pedagogy, and hopes to have 
its religion. It is not a happy or joyful belief, 
yet it is full of confidence and eager courage, — 
a confidence and a courage born not of an acci- 
dental or a casual insight into the nature of 
things, but of a range of thought which em- 
braces the universe, which weighs the atom 
and the sun, which meditates devoutly upon 
the life of the animalcule and seeks to trace it 
in uninterrupted ascent to man, which studies 
with a courage that never despairs the most 
hidden nerve-force, hoping against hope that 
it will yet detect it breaking into thought and 
soul life. It has not the mocking and frivol 
ous temper of Voltaire, nor the satanic mood 
of Byron. So wide has its thought grown, 
that fanaticism is almost impossible. As 
Schiller grieved over the dead gods of Greece, 
this new philosophy is filled with the quiet 
sorrow of fatalism in contemplating the old 
faith. There is a kind of exultation as the 
light breaks in upon the hidden mysteries of 
nature, but in every cry of triumph there is 
an undertone of sadness, almost of despair, as 
from a half-conscious feeling that the end of 
all is death and darkness and nothingness, so 
that what began as the most self-satisfied 
optimism, now fatally turns to pessimism, 



l^HEORIES OF LIFE AND EDUCATION. 1 43 

which is the protest of the unbelieving soul 
against sensualism and atheism. 

Let us trace the theoretical development of 
this earth-creed, and then study its historical 
manifestation, in so far as it bears upon the 
question of education and man's destiny. I 
shall not go further back than Kant, who is 
the father of the critical philosophy, and who 
gave the impulse to the intellectual move- 
ment, which, outside the Church, is bearing 
the modern mind farther and farther away 
from metaphysics. It was he who first in- 
spired a profound distrust of whatever is beyond 
the sphere of experience; and who relegated 
to the region of the unknown the reality which 
underlies the phenomenon. The result of his 
thinkings is this: The phenomenon alone can 
be known; the noumenon is not cognoscible. 

The human reason is involved in radical 
contradictions whenever it attempts to dogma- 
tize concerning God, the soul, and the uni- 
verse; and hence arise, by a necessary process, 
the paralogisms of theology, the gratuitous 
hypotheses of psychology and the antinomies 
of cosmology. Here we have the essential 
principles of the Positivism of Comte, and of 
the Cosmism of Herbert Spencer, — absolute 
condemnation of metaphysics, scepticism con- 
cerning the operations of our highest faculties, 



144 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

and the elimination of all reality which is not 
perceived by the senses. 

The influence of Hegel, which has been so 
profoundly felt by the modern world, is in the 
same direction. The identity of being and not 
being; the personality of God, an absurdity 
unworthy of the attention of serious thinkers; 
the efflcient and final cause of the world imma- 
nent in the world ; nothing is, but everything is 
becoming; truth and reality consequently noth- 
ing absolute, but fugitive forms of what neither 
is, nor is not, — a kind of intellectual star-dust, 
which is not nothing nor anything. These are 
some of the characteristic doctrines of Hegelian 
pantheism, and whatever else may be thought 
of them, they unmistakably confine the life of 
man to this world, which is its own efficient 
and final cause. The universe is an eternal 
flow, in which truth and beauty and goodness 
are but the changeful waves that float upon 
the great world-current of matter. Each fact, 
each individual, is a point of momentary rest 
in the midst of universal mobility. 

In this system religion has but an accidental 
value, and the interest which it inspires is 
chiefly historical and psychological. The forms 
in which man has clothed his dreams of the 
divine are curious as an archaeological study or 
as a branch of ethnology. The vulgar and pas- 



THEORIES OF LIFE AND EDUCATION. I45 

sionate polemics of Protestantism and ration- 
alism are obsolete. Nothing is false or in bad 
taste, but dogmatism. Christianity is man's 
highest effort to give form and body to the 
infinite, and when criticism shall have finally 
done away with all its dogmas, it will be left 
to the inspirations of the heart, to be trans- 
formed indefinitely to suit the requirements of 
progress and civilization. There is no God, 
but there are divine things, — culture, liberty 
and love. This is the soil in which the reli- 
gion of humanity flourishes ; the worship of 
man taking the place of the worship of God. 
In the beginning there is no God, there is 
nothing, only a becoming; in the end, there is 
man. He is the highest, let us serve him. 
And since the individual is but a bubble that 
bursts and remerges in the general air, a snow- 
flake, remelting into the element from which 
it was assumed and congealed into separate- 
ness, let him dwindle and let the race be more 
and more. Let the weak perish, let the fittest 
survive, let all things belong to the strong. 
This is the eternal law of our sacred mother. 
Nature, who alone is supreme. An ideal 
humanity, truly, is only an abstraction ; it 
does not exist, it will never exist; it is but a 
phantom. The individual is contemptible. 
The race is found only in the individual. All 



146 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

this is undeniable. But what will you have? 
Our hypothesis excludes God, and this phan- 
tom of humanity is all that remains to per- 
suade us that to eat and to drink is not the 
only wisdom. In this system too, the religion 
of pantheistic mysticism, the faith of Carlyle 
and of Emerson, finds its justification. Pan- 
theism is obscure and nebular, and mysticism 
loves the uncertain light of a symbolical and 
oracular phraseology, and when the two are 
combined, it is not easy to seize the real 
thought. The thought, however, is panthe- 
istic, the mood is mystic. The central idea, 
upon which the thousand changes of poetic 
and prophetic rhapsody are rung, and from 
which also proceed objurgation, scorn, anger, 
indignation, withering contempt, whether in 
the jolting, interrupted, epigrammatic style 
of Emerson, or in the tumultuous, turgid, 
apodictic manner of Carlyle, is Pantheism. 
For both the efficient and final cause of the 
world is immanent in the world, and the tran- 
scendentalism is modal and accidental. To 
both, systems and creeds are hateful, and to be 
"a swallower of formulas" is the highest 
glory. As there is no absolute truth, there is 
no permanent symbol. To be spontaneous, 
original, and strong, is the only merit. The 
world's great men know no other law than the 



THEORIES OF LIFE AND EDUCATION. I^y 

fatality of their genius. To be weak is, as 
Milton says, the true misery. 

"Thus," says Carlyle, "like some wild-flam- 
ing, wild-thundering train of Heaven's artil- 
lery, does this mysterious mankind thunder 
and flame in long-drawn, quick-succeeding 
grandeur through the unknown deep. Thus 
like a God-created, fire-breathing spirit-host, 
we emerge from the inane, haste stormfully 
across the astonished earth, then plunge again 
into the inane." A rushing forth from noth- 
ing back into nothing, — this is all. The edu- 
cator's business is to prepare man to make this 
stormful haste across the astonished earth in a 
becoming manner. 

Pedagogy cannot aspire to fit him for an 
existence in the inane. For this life must 
man be educated; of another, if other there is, 
neither knowledge nor faith can give us true 
account. The hero of Carlyle's profoundest 
and most eloquent work, walks wearisomely 
through this world, having lost all tidings of 
another and higher. Fixed, starless, tartarean 
darkness envelops his soul. "The everlast- 
ing NO had said: 'Behold, thou art fatherless, 
outcast, and the universe is mine.'" The 
hero made answer : " I am not thine, but free, 
and forever hate thee." This wild protest 
against despair leads him to the Centre of 



148 THINCS OF THE MIND. 

Indifference, from which in grim mockery he 
hurls his objurgations: "God," he says, ''must 
needs laugh outright, could such a thing be, 
to see his wondrous manikins here below." 
He is in the wilderness; it is the wide world 
in an atheistic century. 

Lying here in this Centre of Indifference 
he awakes to a new heaven and a new earth. 
From a high table-land he gazes upon the 
world and contemplates its myriadfold and 
ever-changing forms of beauty and life. " How 
thou fermentest," he exclaims, "and elabo- 
ratest in thy great fermenting vat and labor- 
atory of an atmosphere, of a world ! Oh, 
nature! or, what is nature.'* Ha! Why do I 
not name thee God.'' Art not thou the 'living 
garment of God.?' Oh, Heavens, is it, in 
very deed, He, then, that ever speaks through 
thee; that lives and loves in thee, that lives 
and loves in me.-* " 

And to this pantheism the spirit of mysti- 
cism comes to seek a new worship. The 
Mythus of Christianity is obsolete. "The 
temple thereof, founded some eighteen cen- 
turies ago, now lies in ruins, overgrown with 
jungle, the habitation of doleful creatures." 
A worship and an ideal nevertheless must be 
found. Speculation is by nature endless, form- 
less, a vortex amid vortices. Thought fatally 



THEORIES OF LIFE AND EDUCATION. 1 49 

leads to the abyss in which all things whirl in 
inextricable confusion, and in which nothing 
can be seen or known with certainty; for in 
the lowest deep a lower depth still opening 
swallows the thinker and his thought, beyond 
plummet's sounding, yea, beyond the reach of 
fantasy. The end of life, therefore, is not to 
think, but to act. Not that we might in morbid 
self-introspection eat our own hearts; project- 
ing upon the world we rail at our diseased 
imaginations, have we emerged from the inane. 
Goethe is right. His immortal precept opens 
a new era and founds a new religion. Study, 
he says, how to live; that is, study how to 
make the most of life. "Fool! the ideal is in 
thyself, the impediment too is in thyself; thy 
condition is but the stuff thou art to shape 
that same ideal out of; what matters whether 
such stuff be of this sort or that, so the form 
thou give it be heroic, be poetic.'* O thou 
that pinest in the imprisonment of the actual, 
and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom 
wherein to rule and create, know this of a 
truth. The thing thou seekest is already with 
thee, 'here or nowhere,' couldst thou only 
see." Here or nowhere, study how to make 
the most of life. This is the path that leads 
upward from tartarean darkness and endless 
.chaos to the light and serenity of cosmic har- 



150 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

mony. Carlyle, most assuredly, is no mate- 
rialist, he is no utilitarian; and just as little is 
he a sensualist or a scientific atheist. Against 
all these things his soul cries out in fiery and 
convulsive indignation. What an imperish- 
able odor is there not in those "pig proposi- 
tions " in which he gives us the materialist 
and utilitarian theory of the world? The 
universe is an immeasurable swine's trough. 
Moral evil is unattainability of pig's wash. 
Paradise, called also state of innocence, age 
of gold, was unlimited attainability of pig's 
wash. It is the mission of universal pighood, 
and the duty of all pigs, at all times, to dimin- 
ish the quantity of unattainable, and increase 
that of attainable. All knowledge and device 
and effort ought to be directed thither, and 
thither only. Pig poetry ought to consist of 
universal recognition of the excellence of pig's 
wash and ground barley, and the felicity of 
pigs whose trough is in order, and who have 
had enough. Humph! Who made the pig.? 
Unknown; perhaps the pork butcher. 

The cold and pitiless irony of Swift is here 
seething hot, like molten lava. 

Scientific atheism, too, with its superficial 
and self-conceited rationalism, fills him with 
contempt, in which there is also an element of 
fiery anger. "Thou wilt have no mystery and 



THEORIES OF LIFE AND EDUCATION. 151 

mysticism, he exclaims; wilt walk through 
thy world by the sunshine of what thou callest 
truth, or even by the hand-lamp of what I call 
attorney-logic, and 'explain ' all, 'account ' for 
all, or believe nothing of it. Nay, thou wilt 
attempt laughter; whoso recognizes the un- 
fathomable, all-pervading domain of mystery, 
which is everywhere, under our feet and 
among our hands; to whom the universe is an 
oracle and temple, as well as a kitchen and 
cattle-stall, — he shall be a delirious mystic; 
to him, thou, with sniffing charity, wilt pro- 
trusively proffer thy hand-lamp, and shriek as 
one injured when he kicks his foot through 
it." The universe is awful, mysterious. "Thy 
daily life is girt with wonder, and based on 
wonder; thy very blankets and breeches are 
miracles." The unspeakable divine signifi- 
cance lies in all things. "Atheistic science 
babbles poorly of it, with scientific nomencla- 
tures, experiments, and what not, as if it were 
a poor dead thing to be bottled up in Leyden 
jars and sold over counters. But the natural 
sense of man, in all times, if he will honestly 
apply his sense, knows it to be a living thing, 
— ah, an unspeakable. Godlike thing, towards 
which the best attitude for us after never so 
much science, is awe, devout prostration and 
humility of soul; worship, if not in words, 



152 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

then in silence." This indignant rebuke to 
atheism proceeds from a fervent soul. Impiety 
is offensive to Carlyle, to whom whatever is, 
is divine, is God. All religions he holds are 
good, if only men are sincere. The only 
idolatry is that from which the sentiment has 
departed. To worship sticks and stones with 
all one's heart and in downright honesty, is 
better than all the conventional pieties of our 
modern world. The value of religion is purely 
subjective; it is in the sentiment. The object 
is of small moment, for all possible symbols 
are but representations of the mysterious un- 
known which lies beneath appearance. But 
for Carlyle, as for all who deny the existence 
of a personal God, man is the highest; and 
his religion is hero-worship. His view is 
fixed upon this life alone; he knows no other. 
Here or nowhere. Man rushes forth from 
nothing back into nothing. To educate him 
for a future life, would be as absurd as to edu- 
cate him for a past life. In fact, as he had 
no past life, so will he have no future life. 
Study, therefore, to make the most of this; 
and to teach this highest and only wisdom, 
should be the educator's aim and purpose. 
Carlyle, however, has no faith in any mechan- 
ism or system of education. A gerund-grind- 
ing pedagogue is to him no better than the 



THEORIES OF LIFE AND EDUCATION. 1 53 

wood and leather man whom the Nurembergers 
were to build, and "who should reason as well 
as most country parsons." The curse of the 
age is its belief in mechanism. The soul of 
man, the soul of society, the soul of religion, 
is come to be considered the product of mechan- 
ical action. If the wheels, cogs, valves, pistons, 
and checks are in order, all is well. Man's 
happiness and worth are no longer believed to 
be within himself; his ideal is not a spiritual 
and divine something, but an outward condi- 
tion, in which there will be well-oiled and 
smoothly working machines for manufacturing 
everything; from patent creeds and codes to 
patent breeches. This is atheism, this is in- 
finite evil, infinite despair, and no-religion. 
"We have forgotten God," he says, "in the 
most modern dialect and very pith of the matter, 
we have taken up the fact of this universe as it 
is not. We have quietly closed our eyes to the 
eternal substance of things, and opened them 
only to the shows and shams of things. We 
quietly believe the universe to be intrinsically 
a great unintelligible perhaps; extrinsically 
clear enough it is a great, most extensive 
cattlefold and workhouse, with most extensive 
kitchen ranges, dining tables, — whereat he is 
wise who can find a place ! All the truth of 
this universe is uncertain; only the profit and 



154 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

loss of it, the pudding and praise of it, are 
and remain very visible to the practical man. 
There is no God any longer for us! God's 
laws are become a greatest happiness prin- 
ciple, a parliamentary expediency; the heavens 
overarch us only as an astronomical time- 
keeper. . . . This is verily the plague-spot cen- 
tre of the universal social gangrene, threatening 
all modern things with frightful death. To him 
that will consider it, here is the stem, with its 
roots and tap-root, with its world-wide upas- 
boughs and accursed poison exudations, under 
which the world lies writhing in atrophy and 
agony. You touch the fatal centre of all our 
disease, of our frightful nosology of diseases, 
when you lay your hand on this." "There is 
no religion; there is no God; man has lost his 
soul, and vainly seeks antiseptic salt." The 
blight of this faith in what is dead, godless, 
and mechanic, corrupts our modern education, 
which regards only what is practical and econ- 
omic, and wholly abandons to moral dry-rot 
man's spiritual and religious nature. The 
science of the age is physical, chemical, physi- 
ological. Even mathematics is valued only 
for its mechanic use, in building bridges, 
constructing forts, and indicating the proper 
angle for killing men at given distances. The 
inventor of the spinning-jenny and sewing- 



THEORIES OF LIFE AND EDUCATION. 155 

machine has his reward. The philosopher is 
without honor. Thought is secreted by the 
brain; and poetry and religion are "a product 
of the smaller intestines." What other than 
a mechanical education is possible to men who 
breathe this mephitic, soul-stifling air.? The 
mind is littered, as though it grew like a 
vegetable, with etymological and other com- 
post; it is crammed with dead vocables; it is 
taught that its chief use is to calculate profit 
and loss; and when it is burnt out to a gram- 
matical and arithmetical cinder, its education 
is complete. 

"Alas, so is it everywhere, so will it ever 
be; till the hodman is discharged or reduced 
to hod-bearing and an architect is hired, and 
on all hands fitly encouraged; till communities 
and individuals discover, not without surprise, 
that fashioning the souls of a generation by 
knowledge, can rank on a level with blowing 
their bodies to pieces by gunpowder; that with 
generals and field-marshals, for killing, there 
should be world-honored dignitaries, and were 
it possible, true God-ordained priests for 
teaching." 

No hidebound pedant can educate. Of man, 
such a one knows only that he has a faculty 
called memory, and that it can be acted on 
through the muscular integument by birchen 



156 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

rods. To educate we must touch the mysteri- 
ous springs of love, fear, and wonder, of enthu- 
siasm, poetry, religion. These are the inward 
and vital powers of man; who cannot be roused 
into deep, all-pervading effort by any comput- 
able prospect of profit and loss, for any definite 
finite object, but only for what is invisible and 
infinite. "When we can drain the ocean into 
our mill-ponds, and bottle up the force of 
gravity, to be sold by retail in our gas-jars, 
then we may hope to comprehend the infini- 
tudes of man's soul under formulas of profit 
and loss; and rule over this too, as over a 
patent engine, by checks and valves and 
balances." 

One of Carlyle's great merits is the vivid- 
ness and force with which he brings out man's 
spiritual nature; his craving for the infinite; 
his inborn and necessary dissatisfaction with 
whatever is not eternal and all-perfect. Out 
of the meanness and littleness and emptiness 
of the world which surrounds him, he takes 
refuge in the eternities, the immensities, the 
veracities. It is at least singular that the 
most gifted and earnest writers of the England 
of the nineteenth century, in spite of their in- 
numerable differences in thought and temper, 
should agree in their estimate of English life. 
That it is low and vulgar, selfish and insincere. 



THEORIES OF LIFE AND EDUCATION. 1 57 

without high ideals or generous impulses or 
noble aspirations, is the common testimony of 
Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, of Dickens and 
Thackeray, of Byron and Tennyson, of Ruskin 
and Matthew Arnold. Macaulay, indeed, is 
inclined to optimistic views in whatever con- 
cerns England, but he is purely literary; lives 
on the surface, which he rounds off with a 
polished and ornate phrase, and leaves un- 
touched the deep central heart of things. 

What gloomy energy is there not in the fol- 
lowing words of Carlyle ! — 

" Like the valley of Jehoshaphat it lies round 
us, one nightmare wilderness, and wreck of 
dead men's bones, this false modern world; 
and no rapt Ezekiel imaged to himself things 
sadder, more horrible and terrible, than the 
eyes of men, if they are awake, may now 
deliberately see." 

And in these other words, what depth of 
truth is there not discernible ! — 

" Faith strengthens us, enlightens us, for all 
endeavors and endurances; with faith we can 
do all, and dare all, and life itself has a thou- 
sand times been joyfully given away. But 
the sum of man's misery is even this, that he 
feel himself crushed under the Juggernaut 
wheels, and know that Juggernaut is no 
divinity, but a dead mechanical idol." 



158 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

And again, the angry voice breaks forth in 
sullen, almost despairing protest : — 

"Not Godhead, but an iron, ignoble circle 
of necessity embraces all things; binds the 
youth of these times into a sluggish thrall, or 
else exasperates him into a rebel. Heroic 
action is paralyzed ; for what worth now 
remains unquestionable with him? At the 
fervid period, when his whole nature cries 
aloud for action, there is nothing sacred under 
whose banner he can act; the course and kind 
and conditions of free action are all but indis- 
coverable. Doubt storms in on him through 
every avenue; inquiries of the deepest, pain- 
fullest sort must be engaged with ; and the 
invincible energy of young years wastes itself 
in sceptical, suicidal cavillings, in passionate 
questionings of destiny, whence no answer 
will be returned." 

The weakness, the shallowness, the misery, 
and selfishness which are the results of atheism 
and no-religion, are most clearly discerned 
and forcibly expressed by Carlyle^ He sees 
that faith in something higher than himself is 
the one thing needful for man ; that to live 
for vulgar objects and selfish ends is suicidal, 
is the denial and destruction of all that makes 
life worth having; and when men com.e with 
their schemes for making this earth a luxurious 



THEORIES OF LIFE AND EDUCATION. 159 

lubberland, where the brooks shall run wine, 
and the trees bend with ready-baked viands, 
and who bring their hand-lamp wherewith to 
dispel all darkness, he, without more ado, 
kicks his foot through it, and so leaves them 
and their paper contrivances. He has the gift 
of noble indignation. His very soul loathes 
all sham; he is the sworn enemy of cant, and 
holds sincerity to be the mother virtue. The 
sincere man is the divine man, the hero, the 
highest form which consciousness can assume. 
He comes to us at first hand, with tidings 
from the infinite unknown. The words he 
speaks are no other man's words; he comes 
from the inner fact of things, the heart of the 
world, the primal reality. That the hero have 
what men call faults is of small moment. 
We make too much of faults, says Carlyle. 
He is all fault who has no fault. Hence 
Mahomet, Luther, Cromwell, Rousseau, Burns, 
and Napoleon, are not simply men of genius 
and power, but they are messengers from 
heaven, true prophets, to be received and 
heard with all reverence and obedience; nay, 
to be worshipped in all sincerity. ''And in 
this so despicable age of ours, — be the boun- 
teous heavens ever thanked for it, — two heroes 
have nevertheless been found. Bonaparte 
walked through the war-convulsed world like 



l60 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

an all-devouring earthquake, heaving, thunder- 
ing, hurling kingdom over kingdom. Goethe 
vi^as as the mild-shining, inaudible light, which, 
notwithstanding, can again make that chaos 
into a creation." And now the bounteous 
heavens have to this so despicable age vouch- 
safed a third hero, who is no other than Prince 
Bismarck; and, to crown the work of mercy, 
they have inspired Mr. Froude to reveal to his 
generation the heroic character and sublime 
worth of that much-abused and misunderstood 
demigod, Henry VIII. And so we have veri- 
fied Carlyle's doctrine that the age of miracles 
is not past, but even now is. 

Upon those who, in this modern world, are 
called religious, Carlyle pours, in boundless 
contempt, the full vials of his scorn and wrath. 
They are unveracities, chimeras, and sem- 
blances. Even the best of them keep truck- 
ing and trimming between worn-out symbols 
and hypocrisy. ..." Birds of darkness are 
on the wing, spectres uproar, the dead walk, 
the living dream." The church-clothes, which 
once held and revealed to men's eyes the holy 
of holies, nothing else than the divine idea of 
the world, have now gone sorrowfully out at 
elbows. " Nay, far worse, many of them have 
become mere hollow shapes or masks, under 
which no living figure or spirit any longer 



THEORIES OF LIFE AND EDUCATION. l6l 

dwells ; but only spiders and unclean beetles, 
in horrid accumulation, drive their trade; and 
the mask still glares on you. with its glass 
eyes, in ghastly affectation of life." The reli- 
gion of the Middle Ages is something quite 
different, nay, wholly opposite, a living and 
divine reality. "In those dark ages intellect 
could invent glass, which now she has enough 
ado to grind into spectacles. Intellect built 
not only churches, but a church, the church, 
based on this firm earth, yet reaching and 
leading up as high as heaven." This church 
was planted on the basis of fact, and built 
according to the laws of statics; and its heroes 
and prophets are troubled by no doubt, or 
any sort of doubt. Their "religion is not a 
diseased self-introspection, an agonizing in- 
quiry; their duties are clear to them; the way 
of supreme good plain, indisputable, and they 
are travelling on it. Religion lies over them 
like an all-embracing heavenly canopy, like an 
atmosphere and life element, which is not 
spoken of, which, in all things, is presupposed 
without speech. Is not serene or complete 
religion the highest aspect of human nature, 
as serene cant or complete no-religion is the 
lowest and miserablest ? " 

"Our religion," he says, — speaking of what 
he calls "twelfth-century Catholicism," — "is 
n 



1 62 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

not yet a horrible, restless doubt, still less 
a far horribler composed cant; but a great 
heaven-high unquestionability, encompassing, 
interpenetrating the whole of life." 

In this old Church, planted on the basis of 
fact, built according to the laws of statics, 
heroes were not wanting. Here, for instance, 
is Abbot Samson : " The great antique heart, 
how like a child's in its simplicity, like a 
man's in its earnest solemnity and depth! 
Heaven lies over him wheresoever he goes or 
stands on the earth; making all the earth a 
mystic temple to him, the earth's business all 
a kind of worship. Heaven's splendor over 
his head, hell's darkness under his feet. It 
was not a dilettanteism this of Abbot Samson. 
It was a reality, and it is one. . . . This is 
Abbot Samson's Catholicism of the twelfth 
century. Alas ! compared with any of the 
isms current in these poor days, what a 
thing!" 

No one could have written a nobler history 
of Gregory VII. and his creative work than 
Carlyle ; nor could he have found a grander 
hero; but his temper, like Milton's, led him 
rather to the great destroyers and mighty 
rebels, who walk through the convulsed world, 
upheaving, casting down, blowing to frag- 
ments men and their works. 



THEORIES OF LIFE AND EDUCATION: 1 63 

In his doctrine of hero-worship there are 
doubtless elements of truth. The highest man 
is most like to God of anything that is visible 
in this earth. God himself has walked the 
earth clothed on with human nature, and of 
his divine gifts men are the ministers. The 
soul of man is more than any or all machinery. 
For man's sake was the Sabbath instituted, 
and for him all good and right institutions 
exist; not he for them. He is more than they. 
True religion must not only inspire reverence 
for man, but must produce heroic types of 
men, saints of God, who in strong and painful 
wrestlings with themselves and the spirits of 
darkness, struggle upwards to peace and light, 
leaving behind them a pathway, red with 
blood, but luminous; so that the multitudes 
who grope in the gloom of lower thoughts and 
loves, may not be left without some living tes- 
timony and effulgence of the higher world, for 
which all alike have been created. Even God's 
sacraments fall into disuse unless they are 
held in the hands of true, believing men. 
Reverence for those who are above us is not 
only a Christian virtue, but one which in this 
day has special need of being preached. And 
admiration, too, is wholesome and elevating. 
I admire the gift even where I condemn its 
use. The shallow spirit, which sees no great- 



1 64 THLVGS OF THE MIND. 

ness in man, and no great men, is irreligious. 
But Carlyle exaggerates the value and influ- 
ence of hero-worship, and his ideal is not only 
false but immoral. "All religion," he says, 
"issues in due practical hero-worship. . . . 
Society is founded on hero-worship. ... I 
seem to see in this indestructibility of hero- 
worship the everlasting adamant, lower than 
which the confused wreck of revolutionary 
things cannot fall." Of all this, what Carlyle 
would call attorney logic, and what here may 
fitly enough be called common sense, cannot 
approve. Nevertheless, even the logic-chopper 
must admit that it is fairly deducible from the 
premises. If man springs forth from the un- 
conscious, as Carlyle holds, he can worship 
only himself; for the highest consciousness 
must necessarily think itself the absolute 
highest. In fact this whole system of hero- 
worship is but a development of Hegel's law 
of history, which is pantheistic. The ideal 
man, in this system, is in no true sense ideal. 
The sincere man is not the highest, best, 
wisest man ; for fanaticism may be sincere as 
well as faith, and tyranny as well as justice. 
Moreover, sincerity, in Carlyle's thought, is 
synonymous with naturalness, and it may be 
urged with strong reason that goodness and 
virtue are not natural to man. Hence, Carlyle 



THEORIES OF LIFE AND EDUCATION. 1 65 

loses more and more all ground of difference 
between the jiatiiral and the right; his ideal 
grows less and less spiritual, until finally he 
fails to perceive any higher test of worth than 
sheer strength. Whatever can get upon its 
feet and stand there in spite of all enemies, is 
thereby self-consecrated, in his eyes, as a part 
of the eternal laws. The force which on its 
way to great achievements refuses to be con- 
trolled, the genius which acknowledges no law 
but itself, are not only wonderful but sacred 
and divine. Mahomet may be lustful, Crom- 
well cruel, Luther coarse and sensual, Burns 
a drunkard, Rousseau utterly abject; but to 
remark this is the most unmistakable proof 
that one is a blockhead. Let us bear in mind 
that Carlyle holds nature to be divine and all 
natural forces to be sacred, and we shall easily 
get at his point of view. These men are 
natural, and it is therefore simply absurd to 
suppose that they can be immoral. With what 
devout reverence and admiration does he not 
follow Mirabeau in his lust-defiled and madly 
reckless career? But the Count is natural, a 
swallower of formulas, a contemner of custom ; 
and is not this divine, is it not the highest.? 
Carlyle has some most eloquent passages on 
the quite infinite nature of duty, and Teufels- 
drockh, even in the sorrowfulest wretchedness 



1 66 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

of unbelief, has still this light to convince him 
that the world is God's and not the devil's. 
But when we try to get at the exact import 
of duty, we cannot perceive that in his mind 
it means more than sincerity, naturalness. To 
this infinite nature of duty Mahomet, Crom- 
well, Mirabeau, and Frederick the Great were 
true; all men, in fact, it would seem, are true; 
for " man cannot but obey whatever he ought 
to obey." 

In " Sartor Resartus " there is no more 
striking passage than the following: ** There 
is in man a higher than love of happiness; he 
can do without happiness, and instead thereof 
find blessedness! . . . Love not pleasure, love 
God. This is the everlasting Yea, wherein 
all contradiction is solved; wherein whoso 
walks and works, it is well with him." 

Love God, says Carlyle, but does he mean 
God.? In the multitudinous writings which 
have poured from his pen since that precept was 
recorded, the command is not found, I think, a 
second time. Much and often has he spoken of 
the eternities, the immensities, the veracities, 
the silences, in whose presence we should stand 
in awe and wonder, with devout prostration of 
soul. Much and often too has he spoken of 
the unconscious, the unknown, the unnam- 
able, the infinite nescience, the darkness, and 



THEORIES OF LIFE AND EDUCATION. 1 6/ 

mystery that shrouds man's whole life, lies 
everywhere, under his feet and among his 
hands. God's name, too, he has often since 
written; but a second time, as it is believed, 
he has not called upon men to love God. 
Whence this ominous silence? Love, in the 
human and only sense in which it has a mean- 
ing for us, is of persons and not of things. If 
God is the eternities, the immensities, the 
veracities, the unconscious, it would be most 
preposterous and absurd to ask us to love him. 
Wonder and prostration, self-annihilation, — 
all these, if you will, command, but not love, 
which cannot live except in the light of one 
who loves and knows. Do the eternities love 
me? Do the immensities know me? Does 
the unconscious care for me? I know the diffi- 
culties, I see the obscurities when we attempt 
to think of God as a person. The idea of God 
can be expressed in human language analogi- 
cally only; yet is it undeniably and forever 
true that the highest being who knows and 
loves is the absolute highest. Eternities and 
immensities belong to Him, not He to them. 
Whatever allowance we may be disposed to 
make in consideration of the fact that Carlyle 
is a rhapsodist and a seer, it is impossible not 
to recognize that in his thinking God is not a 
person, and is not therefore the God whom 



1 68 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

St. John declared to be Love. Carlyle has a 
disciple who is a most lucid and intelligible 
writer, whose thought is as transparent as the 
expression he gives it is precise; and he has 
translated his master's idea of God into the 
plainest and simplest language. "God," says 
Matthew Arnold, "is the eternal power, not 
ourselves, which makes for righteousness." 
. . . "The stream of tendency by which all 
things fulfil the law of their being." And 
that this "eternal power," this "stream of 
tendency," is not a person who thinks and 
loves, he plainly tells us. The God of Chris- 
tianity and of Judaism is, he says, only a mag- 
nified and non-natural man. 

Here we have no mystic phrase, no uncertain 
light, no poetic symbolism; but the clear 
revelation of the eternities and the immen- 
sities. The word '' God " is still employed be- 
cause no other has such poetic and mysterious 
power over the human mind; and this is but 
an example of a general process in which the 
meaning of words is undergoing a complete 
transformation. Carlyle's God then does not 
love. He is "a force and thousandfold com- 
plexity of forces; a force which is not we. 
That is all, it is not we; it is altogether 
different from its. Force, force, everywhere 
force." Strength is the divine attribute; the 



THEORIES OF LIFE AND EDUCATION. 1 69 

strong are God's children; and to be weak is 
not only miserable, but immoral. This idea 
fills him with fierce thoughts and dark imagin- 
ings. The crashing of thrones, and the falling 
of altars, and the lurid light of burning cities, 
and the horrid din of murderous battle inspire 
him with wild delight. Force is building 
temples for its worship upon the wreck and 
ruin of all things. He loses, more and more, 
sympathy and tenderness, until he is wholly 
possessed by a sarcastic and gloomy indigna- 
tion. The earth becomes a charnel-house, the 
dead uproar; the light of heaven dies out. 
They only are blessed who find rest in the 
bosom of the unconscious. The most fanatical 
hater of dogmas and creeds, he is become the 
most intolerant of thinkers. What he esteems 
a sham and chimera is so for the eternal laws. 
A symbol worn out for him is henceforth use- 
less forever for all men. In such a temper con- 
tradictions must abound. He makes silence 
a god, and is himself a man of infinite words. 
The French Revolution fills him with a terri- 
ble glee, and yet he curses democracy. The 
end of life, he declares, with Goethe, to be 
action and not thought; and yet he keeps 
thinking and does not otherwise act. To 
reform a world, he well says, no wise man will 
undertake; and yet he chafes and is angry 



I/O THINGS OF THE MIND. 

because the world has not been reformed by 
his preaching. If God is only the "stream of 
tendency," Renan is doubtless a true philoso- 
pher. *'The thinker," he says, ''believes that 
he has little right to direct the affairs of his 
planet; and, contented with the lot which has 
fallen to him, he accepts his impotence with- 
out regret. A spectator in the universe, he 
knows that the world belongs to him only as a 
subject of study; and though he were able to 
reform it, he would perhaps find it so curious 
as it is, that he would lack the courage to 
undertake the task." 

Carlyle is not an original thinker. His 
theories are English interpretations of German 
thought ; but interpretations which only a man 
of genius could have made. His influence 
and significance will be lightly estimated by 
those alone who have not understood him. His 
is the most important name in the English 
literature of this century, and the power which 
he has exercised upon the thought of England, 
and even of America, is vast and profound. 
In his earlier writings, in spite of the latent 
pantheism which has grown upon him with 
such fatal effect, he appealed to the higher 
and spiritual nature of man with an eloquence 
which reaches the inmost soul. He is a truer 
poet than Byron or Tennyson; a profounder 



THEORIES OF LIFE AND EDUCATION. 171 

thinker than Stuart Mill or Herbert Spencer; 
and a worthier historian than Macaulay or 
Froude. He has the most real and subtle 
humor; the pathos of a "divine despair;" 
infinite indignation; the holiest anger, and a 
seraph's loathing of mere matter; and by 
nature he is not without tenderness and the 
deepest sympathy. 

His misfortune and defect is profound and 
radical scepticism concerning the highest truth. 
Greater and more awful than the eternities, 
the immensities, the unconscious, he can con- 
ceive of nothing. The many-colored picture 
of life is painted on a canvas of darkness, and 
in the background there hovers a region of 
doubt which thought cannot possibly trans- 
form into certainty. He fails to perceive that 
what forces us to recognize a reality beneath 
appearances, proclaims also the presence of 
mind in the laws and harmonies of nature. 
The fearful and infinite force overwhelms him, 
and the supreme and central power of love and 
wisdom is not felt. Hence we find him still, 
as his disciple has sung of himself — 

" Wandering between two worlds, one dead, 
The other powerless to be born." 

After all that can be said, has been said, in 
praise of Force, this still remains to be said. 



1/2 THINGS OF THE MIND, 

that it cannot be loved. And yet except in 
trustful love man finds no peace and no 
blessedness. 

"Unhappy men," said St. Teresa, ''who do 
not love! " 



CHAPTER VI. 

CULTURE AND RELIGION. 

The aids to noble life lie all within. — Matthew Arnold. 

THE simple and comprehensive idea of edu- 
cation includes within itself almost every- 
thing. It is as many-sided as human nature, 
and its limits are as wide as the capacities of 
the soul, which in its hopes, desires, and aspi- 
rations is infinite. All things have an educa- 
tional value, and that man is educable is the 
great and guiding fact in history. Forms of 
government, laws, social customs, literature, 
industrial arts, climate, and soil not only edu- 
cate, but are esteemed according to the kind of 
education which they give. Whatever tends to 
make one more than he is or to hinder him 
from being less than he is, is a part of educa- 
tion. The various races of men are doubtless 
unlike in their natural endowments, but they 
differ far more widely by reason of the dis- 
similar educational influences which have acted 
upon them. 



174 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

It may be affirmed with truth that our good 
qualities are acquired. 

We are taught to be modest, truthful, brave, 
gentle, humane, as we are taught to speak a 
language. Excellence is thus a triumph over 
nature, and virtue is the result of victories over 
instinctive passion. The tendency so common 
in our day to exalt instinct, almost to conse- 
crate it, springs from an optimistic theory which 
is utterly at variance with the facts. The wise 
man does not follow nature but subdues it into 
conformity with reason ; though to do this he 
must, of course, work in accordance with the 
laws of nature. The first and deepest element 
in the life of the individual as of the race is re- 
ligious faith, which consequently is the chief 
and highest instrument of education. Religion 
is man's supreme effort to rise above nature and 
above his natural self It gives him a definite 
aim and an absolute ideal. ** Be ye perfect," it 
says, '' as your Heavenly Father is perfect." 
It constitutes him a dweller in a world where 
mere utility has no place. It gives him high 
thoughts of himself, and thereby exalts his aims 
and heightens his standards of conduct. It 
makes him feel that to be true, to be good, to 
be beautiful, is most desirable, even though 
no practical gain or use should thence follow. 
It turns his thoughts to spiritual worth and 



CULTURE AND RELIGION, 1 75 

diminishes his estimate of what is accidental and 
phenomenal. It addresses itself to the soul, 
and seeks to give it that pre-eminence which is 
the condition of all progress; for, " by the soul 
only shall the nations be great and free." It 
proclaims the paramount worth of right con- 
duct, which alone brings a man at peace with 
himself, and thus makes possible the harmoni- 
ous development of his being. Little cause for 
wonder is there that everywhere in all time 
priests should be the first teachers of the race ; 
that poetry, and music, and painting, and sculp- 
ture, and architecture should first become pos- 
sible when the creative voice of faith in the 
unseen commands them to exist. But upon 
this it is not my purpose now to dwell, and I 
merely intimate that true religion, as it appeals 
to all man's highest faculties with supreme 
power, must necessarily promote true culture. 
The direct aim of religion, however, is not to 
produce culture, nor is it the immediate aim of 
culture to produce religion; and it may, there- 
fore, happen that they come in conflict. I take 
the matter seriously, and have not the faintest 
desire to join in the easy sneer with which this 
word culture is often received. That in the 
mouths of the frivolous and the vulgar it should 
be no better than cant, is only what may happen 
to any word which such persons take up, and 



176 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

it were wiser to reflect that the ideal of culture 
has exercised an irresistible fascination over 
many of the most finely endowed minds that 
have ever lived. 

The word itself may not indeed be the best; 
but it seems to serve the purpose better than 
any other which we who speak English possess. 
They who propose culture to us as something 
desirable, would have us aim at a full and har- 
monious development of our nature, greater 
freedom from narrowness and prejudice, more 
disinterested and expansive sympathies, flexi- 
bility and openness of mind, courtesy and gen- 
tleness, and whatever else goes to form the 
idea of a liberal education. And if we ask 
them what end we may expect to gain by fol- 
lowing this advice, we betray our inability to 
appreciate their words. Culture is an end in 
itself, and brings its own reward. It is good to 
have a trained and flexible mind, wide and re- 
fined sympathies. Just as those who are truly 
religious do not value their faith for any worldly 
advantage which it may give them, so the dis- 
ciples of culture cannot consider the pursuit of 
excellence as a means of success. To aim at 
such a result would be to deny the virtue of 
culture. They are little concerned with the use- 
fulness of knowledge. The knowledge is more 
than its use, and they choose rather to be intelli- 
gent than to be rich or powerful or in office. 



CULTURE AND RELIGION I'J'J 

To urge the pursuit of learning with a view to 
money-making is apostasy from light, is deser- 
tion to the enemies of the soul. This opinion, 
it is needless to say, is in open conflict with our 
American notions of education. Utility is our 
guiding principle in this matter, and to say of 
any kind of knowledge that it is not useful is to 
condemn it. The best defence which we can 
set up in behalf of religion itself is to prove that 
it promotes the general welfare ; that it is use- 
ful, not that it is true. Hardly any man with 
us is able to rise above this spirit, which con- 
trols not only our elementary, but equally our 
higher education. We universally regard knowl- 
edge as a means to worldly success. A certain 
mental training we hold to be essential, and 
those who go beyond this study with a view to 
entering some one of the professions. But to 
study for even a learned profession is not the 
way to get a liberal education ; for this highest 
culture comes when the mind is disciplined for 
its own sake, and not with the view to narrow 
and fit it to any trade or business. Hence, it 
not unfrequently happens that successful pro- 
fessional men are almost wholly lacking in gen- 
eral intelligence, mental flexibility, and wide 
sympathies. And this is even used as an argu- 
ment against culture. 

That we take a utilitarian view of education 



178 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

is neither accidental nor unintentional. It is 
the view which our history suggests and seems 
to justify, and it is the one which we as a people 
have deliberately chosen to adopt. And in the 
estimation of a very great many persons the 
result is satisfactory. The aim is not exalted, 
and it has been attained with remarkable rapid- 
ity and ease. Hence we are self-complacent 
and inclined to boastfulness. We point with 
pride to our vast population, to the boundless 
extent of territory which we have subdued and 
forced to yield up its wealth, to the roads and 
cities which we have built, to the schools which 
are within the reach of all and are the same for 
all, to the industrial and commercial enterprise 
which enables us to compete successfully in the 
markets of the world with the oldest and richest 
nations, to the inventive genius which leads in 
the application of mechanical contrivances to 
the production of personal and social comfort, 
and, to crown our happiness, we are the freest 
of all peoples. That we are faultless no one 
pretends to claim; but our achievements are 
so real and valuable, that we should not be slow 
to believe that the methods which have enabled 
us to accomplish so much will give us also the 
power to overcome the dangers which may 
threaten our peace and progress. Our aims 
are mechanical, and in congratulating ourselves 



CULTURE AND RELIGION. 1 79 

upon the success with which we attain them we 
lose sight of the fact that these aims ought not 
to be pursued as ends in themselves. Freedom 
and wealth, like railroads and telegraphs, are 
means and not ends. Their value is not in 
themselves, but in what is made possible 
through them ; and it is the office of culture to 
force people to recognize this. The cultivated 
mind is smitten with the love of an internal and 
spiritual beauty, and holds machinery cheap. 
It is bent upon seeing things as they are; it 
looks through marble walls and gaudy liveries 
and the smoke of factories, and will not be con- 
tent until it discovers what beauty and truth, if 
any, are hidden under these shows. It is wholly 
free from the superstition of wealth and success. 
If the rich man is ignorant, coarse, and narrow, 
he is a beggar in the eyes of culture. Fond 
parents in this land find great comfort in the 
thought that their boy may one day be Presi- 
dent of the United States ; but if the President 
is a sot or a boor, culture will ignore him though 
he should hold office for life. 

We cannot laugh at culture to any good pur- 
pose, for it has the spiritual mind which judges 
all things. To the opinions of the vulgar it 
gives no heed, and they who have insight are 
reverent, seeing that it is good. It can be in- 
different even to fame. Here again we may 



l80 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

remark that its unworldly temper and spiritual 
standard of perfection bring it into friendly re- 
lation with religion. Culture is concerned with 
the formation of the mind and the character, 
and values all things with reference to this end. 
It does not despise temporal and mechanical 
benefits, but seeks to turn them to the account 
of the soul. The man is more than his money, 
or his office, or his trade. Wealth is good in 
that it gives freedom and independence, the 
opportunity for self-improvement. The worth 
of all this money-getting industrialism which 
absorbs our life is in the preparation which it 
makes for culture. The test of civilization is 
the degree of human perfection which it pro- 
duces. To dwell with complacency upon the 
thought of our cities, railroads, and wealth, is to 
be narrow and vulgar. We are not concerned 
with wood, and stone, and iron, but with man. 
What kind of man will this social mechanism 
shape? This is what we are interested to know, 
and this is what culture would have us keep in 
view. There are many intelligent, and other- 
wise not unfriendly persons, who placing them- 
selves at this standpoint, find it impossible to 
look with enthusiasm or even complacency 
upon our American life. Renan, for instance, 
with whom the idea of culture is supreme, takes 
no pains to conceal his opinion of us. '' The 



CULTURE AND RELIGION. l8l 

countries," he says, *' which, like the United 
States, have created a considerable popular in- 
struction, without any serious higher education, 
will long have to expiate this fault by their 
intellectual mediocrity, their vulgarity of man- 
ners, their superficial spirit, their lack of general 
intelligence." 

Again : " The ideal of American society is 
further removed than that of any other from the 
ideal of a society governed by science. The 
principle that society exists only for the welfare 
and freedom of the individuals of which it is 
composed, would seem to be contrary to the 
plans of nature, which takes care of the species, 
but sacrifices the individual. It is greatly to be 
feared lest the final outcome of this kind of 
democracy be a social state in which the degen- 
erate masses will have no other desire than to 
indulge in the ignoble pleasures of the lower 
and vulgar man." And Renan thinks it proba- 
ble that the senseless vanity of a population 
which has received elementary instruction, will 
make it unwilling to contribute to the mainte- 
nance of an education superior to its own ; and 
he, therefore, has little hope that democracy 
will prove favorable to culture and the produc- 
tion of great men, which, in his opinion, is the 
end for which the human race exists. With 
this view of American life Matthew Arnold 



1 82 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

coincides. The circumstances of the case force 
him to think that America, the chosen home of 
newspapers and politics, is without general intel- 
ligence; "and that in the things of the mind, 
and in culture and totality, America, instead of 
surpassing us all, falls short." The cause of 
this he finds not so much in our democratic 
form of government as in the inherited tenden- 
cies of the people of the United States, which 
issues from the English Puritan middle class 
and reproduces its narrow conception of man's 
spiritual range. 

Let us receive with equanimity and good- 
nature the criticism which finds us so greatly 
deficient in knowledge and refinement. Our 
ability to do this is of itself encouraging. The 
era in which it was possible to think that what- 
ever is American is excellent has fortunately 
passed, and a greater familiarity with the his- 
tory, the literature, and the manners of other 
nations has taken the freshness from our self- 
conceit. The sweet uses of adversity too have 
taught us most admirable lessons. Every man 
may have a vote, and every child may go to 
school, and the time may still be out of joint; 
the increase of national wealth need not protect 
the multitude from poverty and suffering, and the 
growth of intelligence may coexist with the decay 
of morals and the loss of faith. 



CULTURE AND RELIGION. 1 83 

** It is not fatal to Americans," says Arnold, 
" to have no religious establishments, and no 
effective centres of high culture ; but it is fatal 
to them to be told by their flatterers, and to 
believe, that they are the most intelligent people 
in the world, when of intelligence in the true 
and fruitful sense of the word, they even singu- 
larly, as we have seen, come short." 

Admitting all, even the worst that can be 
said of us on this point, our very enemies must 
nevertheless concede that the preparations for 
a higher culture have been made by us and 
exist under altogether favorable conditions. 
Great fault may be justly found with our whole 
educational mechanism. The colleges and uni- 
versities are doubtless imperfect enough and 
often obstacles to the development of intelli- 
gence. But the remedy is in our hands. 

Our wealth and industrialism place within easy 
reach whatever can be accomplished by money, 
and there are no difficulties which may not be 
overcome by earnest faith in the ideal which 
culture presents. The important question for 
us is whether this ideal ought to excite our 
admiration and love. A very great number 
of sincere and enlightened men, representing 
conflicting tendencies and opposite schools of 
thought, look upon the ideal of culture as false 
and hurtful to the best interests of man ; and 



1 84 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

the objections which they urge are numerous 
and weighty. The masses of mankind, they 
say, have neither the opportunity nor the desire 
for culture; and this is fortunate, for devotion 
to this ideal has an unmistakable tendency to 
diminish zeal for the general welfare. The 
men of culture hold themselves aloof from the 
crowd and take no interest in the practical ques- 
tions of the day. They live in a dreamland of 
poesy, and in the consciousness of their inability 
to help forward any good cause content them- 
selves with criticism, which unsettles convictions 
and weakens the zest for action. They preach 
loud enough that the end of life is an act and 
not a thought, and yet both their example and 
their teaching tend to obscure all the ways of 
life in which men are accustomed to labor. 
Goethe writes poetry and preserves his philo- 
sophic serenity in the midst of the appalling 
calamities of his country, of which he seems 
to be altogether oblivious. Carlyle, through 
half a century, chides his fellow-men, accepts 
neither faith nor science, neither acts himself 
nor points out to others how they may labor to 
good purpose. Arnold frankly admits that he 
has no desire to see men of culture intrusted 
with power, and were he consulted by his coun- 
trymen on questions of actual moment he could 
only repeat the precept of Socrates, " Know 



CULTURE AND RELIGION. 185 

thyself." When France lay crushed and bleed- 
ing at the feet of Germany, Renan withdrew to 
a quiet retreat to compose Platonic dialogues, 
in which he gives expression to his contempt 
for the crowd and his distrust of all the popular 
movements of the age. Culture thus seems to 
produce a sceptical and effeminate habit of mind 
which is incompatible with strong and abiding 
convictions, and consequently destructive of 
resolution and enthusiasm, without which man 
cannot accomplish any great purpose in life ; 
and Mr. Frederic Harrison may not be wholly 
mistaken in thinking that the men of culture 
are the only class of responsible beings in the 
community who cannot with safety be intrusted 
with power. This he says of England, and with- 
out reference to America, where this class can 
hardly be said to exist at all ; and the appre- 
hension of their getting into power need not, 
therefore, be a cause of anxiety to our states- 
men, whose mental resources, even as things 
are, seem to be not more than sufficient to meet 
the demands which are made upon them. The 
believers in culture, it is further urged, are prop- 
agandists of a cosmopolitan and non-national 
spirit, which undermines patriotism, directs at- 
tention to an impossible ideal, and disenchants 
men of their inherited character, which, what- 
ever may be its faults, is the essential basis of 



1 86 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

virtue and excellence. The education derived 
from the national genius, like that of the family, 
cannot be supplied by any other agency, and 
the cosmopolitanism which ignores this must 
necessarily tend to create a temper like that of 
the ideal Epicurean, who is described as indif- 
ferent to public affairs and the fate of empires, 
and not subject to any such weakness as pity 
for the poor or jealousy of the rich. In this 
view, then, culture is destructive of patriotism. 

Other objections are urged against its ethical 
character. Culture, it is said, is only a refined 
epicureanism. Its aim is to educate man so as 
to fit him for the enjoyment of the greatest 
possible pleasure. It shrinks from vice, not 
because it is evil, but because it is gross and 
disgusting. The men of culture, like the ancient 
Greeks, are without the sense of sin, and con- 
sequently at best have but a conventional 
morality. 

Aristophanes was not more pagan than Goethe, 
who is the typical representative of the new 
religion. He it is who taught that to be beauti- 
tiful is higher than to be good ; and his denial 
of sin is implied in the doctrine that repentance 
is wrong. He assumes that there is no objec- 
tive standard of right and wrong. Man is a law 
unto himself, and the pursuit of perfection is the 
effort to bring all his faculties into free and 



CULTURE AND RELIGION. 1 87 

unhindered play. That which I feel to be true 
is true for me ; that which I feel to be good is 
good for me ; and therefore creeds and dogmas, 
whether religious or philosophic, cease to have 
either life or meaning as soon as the time-spirit 
has flown from them. The web of life is woven 
of necessity and chance ; we must yield to des- 
tiny, and seek to make the most of chance. 
Happiness is to be sought, not in the fulfilment 
of duty, but in the sweetness and light which 
are the results of the complete and harmonious 
development of our nature. *' Woe be to every 
kind of education," says Goethe, "which destroys 
the means of obtaining true culture, and points 
our attention to the end instead of securing our 
happiness on the way." The philosophy of 
culture is, then, it would appear, only another 
form of utilitarianism, and tacitly assumes that 
greatest-happiness principle against which it so 
loudly protests. 

It, in fact, looks upon this life as alone real 
and enjoyable, and considers him a madman 
who troubles himself here in the hope of ob- 
taining blessedness hereafter. Morality, con- 
sequently, is nothing absolute, and whatever 
secures our ** happiness on the way " is good. 
The point sought to be made is this: that, as 
culture results intellectually in universal criti- 
cism and doubt, so it morally ends in unlimited 



1 88 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

indulgence. The vulgar herd, finding no delight 
in the refined and studied pleasures of the cul- 
tivated, will have no other way of showing its 
appreciation of their theories than by wallowing 
in Epicurus's sty. And this, indeed, is the 
history of culture amongst all peoples. We 
know from Aristophanes what was the moral 
condition of the age of Pericles ; and he ascribes 
the frightful degeneracy from the standard of 
conduct which made the men who fought and 
won at Marathon to what he most aptly calls 
the " new education," or in the language of our 
time, modern culture. The same story is re- 
peated in Rome. Virtue and public spirit flour- 
ished in the midst of poverty and rustic man- 
ners; but when conquered Greece with the 
silken cords of culture led her captors captive, 
together with letters and refinement every kind 
of corruption was introduced into the State ; 
and the Latin classics almost universally attrib- 
ute the ruin of their country to this cause. 
Sallust considers a taste for painting as a vice 
no less than drunkenness ; and Horace abounds 
in praise of the rigid virtue and simple ways of 
the fathers. And in modern times the age of 
Leo X. was an era of moral degeneracy, and 
that of Louis XIV. was immediately followed by 
the most humiliating and disgraceful epoch in 
French history; while in England, culture, as 



CULTURE AND RELIGION. 1 89 

represented by the court of Charles II., fostered 
the most loathsome and hideous sensuality. 
Germany's culture period, too, is one of moral 
paralysis, and it is not surprising that it should 
have created the philosophy of hate and despair 
as taught by Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann. 
Goethe himself may inspire admiration and 
enthusiasm, but not perfect respect. 

It is further urged that this historical relation- 
ship between culture and licentiousness is 
founded in the nature of things; that polite 
literature and the elegant arts necessarily tend 
to create frivolous and effeminate habits of 
thought and feeling, because they separate the 
sentiment from the deed, whereas the end of 
feeling is to impel us to act. To luxuriate 
therefore in fine sentiments, noble thoughts, 
and the elegancies of style, and to rest in this 
indulgence is of itself immoral. The springs of 
action are thereby perverted from their proper 
use, and a character is developed like that ot 
novel-readers who weep over the misfortunes 01 
imaginary heroes, and spurn the wretched from 
their door. The lovers of culture themselves 
recognize the evil and the danger, and hence 
they vociferously preach the necessity of ac- 
tion ; but in vain, as their own example shows. 
They give us fine theories, but have no hope 
of realizing them ; which is not surprising, for 



IQO THINGS OF THE MIND. 

the habit of considering things from every point 
of view, and of weighing all that can be said for 
and against every opinion, begets a sophistical 
and hesitating disposition, which as a matter 
of course renders action distasteful, and more- 
over warps the practical judgment and unfits it 
for deciding upon any right course of conduct. 
A dreamer is not a man of action, and the work 
of the world is not done by critics. 

St. Paul's examples of men who wrought 
great things by faith may be generalized and 
applied universally. All heroic conduct springs 
from the confidence which comes of faith. 
Knowledge does not suffice; for what will be 
the outcome of a given series of human acts 
cannot be known, and must therefore be taken 
on trust. Men who perform grandly see what 
ought to be done and move forward ; that is, 
they trust their intuitions, and not the analysis 
of a critical survey of the situation. At the 
battle of Lodi, Napoleon said the bridge must 
be taken ; his officers declared it impregnable ; 
he unsheathed his sword and passed over it 
behind the fleeing enemy. Culture is dilettante- 
ism. It may fill up an idle hour, but is as im- 
potent to lead the world as millinery. In fact, 
Arnold himself seems to perceive that it is just 
here that the special weakness of the new phi- 
losophy is revealed. The men of culture have 



CULTURE AND RELIGION, jgi 

failed conspicuously in conduct. They are un- 
able even to subdue " the great faults of our 
animality." " They have failed in morality, 
and morality is indispensable." He insists 
again and again upon the paramount impor- 
tance of conduct, and for the development of 
this ethical character he trusts to religion and 
not to culture. Hence though for him God is 
only *' the stream of tendency," he will not give 
up the Bible. He throws aside indeed the 
whole dogmatic basis upon which the Bible 
rests, and yet would still seem to think that it 
is possible to preserve its moral teaching; and 
this leads us to another objection which is 
urged by the opponents of culture, namely, that 
it is irreligious. That this objection is not un- 
founded appears plainly to follow from what 
has already been said ; for if culture fatally ends 
in universal criticism and immorality it is obvi- 
ously in open conflict with religion. There is, 
it is true, an apparent similarity in their aims 
and ideals. Both propose perfection as the 
end to be sought for, and both place this per- 
fection in an inward spiritual state, and not in 
any outward condition ; and neither therefore 
looks upon material progress with the compla- 
cency which is so natural to the mere worldling. 
A deeper view, however, will discover the latent 
antagonism. The perfection at which culture 



192 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

aims is purely natural and has reference to this 
life alone. It loves excellence rather than vir- 
tue, and is enamoured of beauty rather than of 
goodness. Religion emphasizes the evil of sin; 
culture its grossness. The thoughts of the re- 
ligious are with God, while the lovers of culture 
are occupied with themselves; and hence hu- 
mility is the attitude of the one, and pride of 
the other. Self-denial is accepted by culture 
only as a means to higher and purer pleasure; 
by religion it is inculcated as the proof of love. 
Culture believes in this life only; religion in 
the life to come. And finally, culture looks 
upon itself as an end ; but in the eyes of reli- 
gion it can be at best merely a means. 

As it is not my purpose to enter a plea on 
behalf of culture, I shall be at no pains to at- 
tempt an answer in detail to all these objections. 
That many of them at least are not captious, 
but are based upon real views of the subject, I 
am ready to admit; and nevertheless the case 
of those who dispute the validity of the infer- 
ence which is drawn is, as I take it, not des- 
perate. To those who urge that culture is 
cosmopolitan and weakens the spirit of patriot- 
ism, the reply may be made that an exagger- 
ated nationalism has been the cause of number- 
less woes to the human race. This is the 
stronghold of war and of all the train of evils 



CULTURE AND RELIC lOAT. 193 

which follow in its wake ; this is the source of 
that restrictive legislation which has interfered 
with free trade and built barriers in the way of 
progress ; this is the foment of that fatal preju- 
dice which has nurtured a narrow conceit, that 
shuts the national mind of each country against 
the world's experience. 

The Christian doctrine of the brotherhood of 
all men, and of one world-wide spiritual king- 
dom in which all may receive the rights of citi- 
zenship, would seem to point toward a social 
state in which differences of race and country, 
if not obhterated, will at least remain compara- 
tively inoperative. That the men of culture 
would make but sorry statesmen or leaders of 
party we may grant. But a poet is not found 
fault with because he is not a metaphysician, 
nor is a general criticised for lack of taste in the 
fine arts. It is quite as important surely that 
there should be calm and enlightened thinkers 
as that there should be sturdy and indefati- 
gable workers; and precisely where men are 
busiest with their temporal projects and me- 
chanical contrivances, it is well that there should 
be found those who assume a loftier tone and 
point to higher aims. Every supreme mind, 
like the loftiest mountain peaks, rises into a 
region where it dwells, far above the storm- 
^3 



194 TBINGS OF THE MIND. 

cloud, in serene solitude; and, therefore, is it 
said that genius is melancholy. The most per- 
fect culture also partakes of this loneliness, 
and is ill at ease in the crowd ; but this only 
serves to enhance the value of the criticism 
which it pronounces upon the common ways 
and aims of men. He who, free from the pas- 
sion and blinding dust of the conflict, surveys 
the field from an eminence, sees many things 
which are hidden from the eyes of the combat- 
ants. It is the fault of the eager rivalry of busy 
life that it leaves no time for calm reflection, 
and hence active workers grow narrow, and 
would bend the universe to their little schemes. 
The salvation of society is made to depend 
upon the crotchet of a politician or upon the 
opening up of a new market for some article of 
commerce, or it is held to be within the com- 
petency of a school system to bring on the 
millennium. It is certainly of the first impor- 
tance that men be fed, and clothed, and gov- 
erned; but, as Goethe says, "the useful en- 
courages itself, for the crowd produce it and 
none can dispense with it; the beautiful needs 
encouragement, for few can create it, and it is 
required by many." If the men of culture do 
not act, they at least furnish the means of ac- 
tivity to others. The old alchemists were no 



CULTURE AND RELIGION. 1 95 

better than dreamers and idlers, but to them we 
are indebted for our physical science. It is 
easier to act than to think; and hence the 
world abounds in busy men, whereas a real 
thinker is hardly to be met with. Should we 
then employ all our efforts to stimulate an ac- 
tivity which is already feverish, and do nothing 
to encourage wider and profounder habits of 
thought? To take the lowest view, it will 
hardly be denied that the power to think cor- 
rectly is useful. Idealists are often laughed at 
in their own day; but the dreams of the present 
not unfrequently become the recognized prin- 
ciples of action of the future. The common 
man, of course, living in the present, is impa- 
tient to see his labors bear immediate fruit ; 
and a vulgar generation attaches little value to 
the good which can be enjoyed only by those 
who come after it; but without self-denial 
neither wisdom nor virtue can exist, and to aim 
at the reward which comes of right conduct is 
the certain way to disappointment. 

The charge that culture has an immoral ten- 
dency is more serious, and possibly not so easily 
set aside, for history seems to bear out the asser- 
tion that ages of luxury and refinement have 
been invariably remarkable for licentiousness of 
manners. It is plain, however, that the vices as 
well as the virtues of a civilized people differ from 



196 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

those of barbarians. The highway robber is gen- 
erally no sybarite. Civilization brings large bodies 
of men together in cities, encourages industry, 
protects wealth, creates classes that abound in 
opulence and leisure, and it consequently offers 
opportunities for the indulgence of effeminate 
and luxurious habits. The spirit of an age of 
refinement is humane and merciful. Its tastes 
are nice and its pleasures attractive. The tem- 
pers of men are softened, and war itself smooths 
its rugged front, and is waged without vindictive 
cruelty. The weak are protected, the orphan 
is cared for, and the poor find sympathy. The 
man of culture sins by over-refinement, the vul- 
gar man by excess in indulgence. Savages and 
barbarians are not epicures, but they are the 
slaves of gluttony and drunkenness to a greater 
extent than the civilized races. Again, venality 
and bribery will not be common in an age in 
which the ambitious and covetous find it easier to 
attain their ends by violence. It must be borne 
in mind too that the literature of an age of culture 
generally becomes classic, and hence the vices 
of those ages are made immortal, while the 
memory of the crimes of barbarians perishes. 
And there is ever a spirit of restlessness and 
discontent in an epoch of refinement, which 
causes men to yield more readily to the natural 
propensity to depreciate the present and unduly 



CULTURE AND RELIGION: 1 97 

exalt the past ; and it so happens that its vices 
are precisely those which lend themselves most 
effectively to the purpose of the satirist. A few 
examples of cruelty and licentiousness are fas- 
tened upon, and are so perverted as to be made 
to appear to be the rule to which they are only 
exceptions. 

To consider the subject, then, apart from the 
question as to the relation which exists between 
religious faith and morality, and this is the view 
we now take of it, it does not appear that a 
state of culture is more favorable to vice than 
barbarism. It would seem on the contrary that 
knowledge, refinement, and industry tend to 
make men virtuous. If we hear less of the 
crimes of savage and barbarous peoples it is not 
because they do not abound, but because they 
are not recorded, or when recorded repel us, 
since a cultivated mind can find no pleasure in 
reading of rapine, and murder, and brutish or- 
gies; whereas, unfortunately, such is the weak- 
ness of man, when sin loses its grossness it 
seems even to those who are not depraved to 
lose something of its evil. 

But after all has been said it must be con- 
fessed that the history of culture does not justify 
us in thinking that it is able to create a pure 
and genuine morality. At best it but throws 
the cloak of decency over the ulcer which it is 



198 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

powerless to heal. Ascetic writers tell us that 
in order to combat sin successfully we must 
have a real abhorrence of it, and this culture 
lacks. With it virtue is a point of good taste, 
and vice want of breeding; and it does not hate 
the evil, but fears the shame and confusion of 
detection. This, I say, is the ethical character 
of historical culture, and I now proceed to 
examine whether it is a defect inherent in 
the nature of culture, or an accident attributable 
to the conditions under which it has been 
developed. 

Culture, in the modern sense of the word, and 
considered apart from the influence of Chris- 
tianity, is derived from Athens, the city of mind 
and the world's first university. No people has 
ever equalled the Athenian in mental versatility, 
grace, penetration, and originality. The pro- 
verb '' To think is difficult; to act, easy " seems 
to be untrue in their case. Thought was as 
natural and as easy to them as to breathe, 
and there is hardly an intellectual or poetical 
conception in modern literature which may not 
be found, in germ at least, even in the compara- 
tively small portion of their writings that has 
come down to us; and their language is still 
the most perfect instrument of thought known 
to men. They were, and to a great extent still 
are, the teachers of the civilized world In philos- 



CULTURE AND RELIGION. 1 99 

ophy, eloquence, poetry, and art ; and they have, 
therefore, necessarily exerted, whether for good 
or evil, a vast ethical influence. Now to the 
Greek, virtue and beauty are identical. His re- 
ligion is the worship of the beautiful ; and the 
good is the fair, the harmonious, the musical. 
The very name which he gave to the universe 
indicated that it revealed itself to his mind prima- 
rily under the aspect of harmony and proportion ; 
and hence for conscience he substituted taste, a 
kind of exquisite sense of the graceful and the 
decorous, and his religion embodied itself in 
art. His sacred books were poems, his temples, 
which were models of grace and symmetry, were 
open to the heavens and bathed in the cheerful 
light of day, and when he offered sacrifice and 
prayer he was crowned with flowers and quaffed 
the golden wine with song and dance. In his 
maturity he is only a handsome youth in whose 
veins the current of life is full and strong. He 
walks in a perennial spring, and the flowers bloom 
wherever he goes, and the air trills with the 
matin songs of birds. He lives in a world of 
delights and dreads nothing but death. He 
has no thought of sin, the very gods love what 
he loves and think no wrong. And when he 
praises virtue it is because it is noble, and beau- 
tiful, and full of pleasant sweetness. It is a fine 
figure, graceful and fair as a statue of Pentelic 



200 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

marble chiselled by the hand of Phidias. Un- 
fortunately, a theory based upon the assumption 
that to do right is to do only what is pleasant 
will not fit into a world which has been wrenched 
from its original harmony. The sense of the 
beautiful was soon sunk in sensuous voluptuous- 
ness, and Athens has left us nothing to admire 
except her genius. And yet the ideal of life 
which her great minds have traced out for us is 
so noble, so generous, that we are hardly sur- 
prised that its winning grace and brightness 
should create a kind of worship in the sensitive 
souls of poets and artists, and thus impress 
ineffaceably its own fair features upon the cul- 
ture of all succeeding ages. But as this ideal is 
without moral force and the seriousness of char- 
acter which is thence derived, it is, like many 
fairest things, frail and unsuited to the stern 
work of a world where self-conquest is the price 
of victory. There is want of correspondence 
between the inward strength and the outward 
form, and in thinking of this noble dream of 
genius we can but repeat the poet's lament 
for Italy : — 

•* Italia ! oh, Italia, thou who hast 

The fatal gift of beauty, which became 
A funeral dower of present woes and past. 

On thy sweet brow is sorrow ploughed by shame." 

Culture is akin to poetry, but life is mostly 
prose and must rest upon a more substantial 



CULTURE AND RELIGION. 201 

basis. Is it not possible, then, we ask, to bring 
to the help of this fine and artistic ideal of 
human perfection some force, not its own, from 
which it may derive the strength not to yield to 
the fatality of its natural bent? In other words, 
can religion, whose dominant idea is morality, 
be brought into friendly relationship with cul- 
ture, the ruling thought of which is beauty, or 
to use the accepted phrase, sweetness and light? 
In introducing the present examination I stated 
that there need be no antagonism between true 
religion and true culture, and I now find that I 
am called upon to defend or else to withdraw 
this affirmation. "Deny thyself" is the word 
of Christ; " Think of living" is the precept of 
culture ; and certainly the self-indulgent and 
pleasure-seeking life of the Greek is the very 
opposite of the ideal which is presented to the 
Christian. The one looks upon this earth as a 
garden of delight; the other has no abiding 
city here, but passes as a pilgrim, who in the 
midst of gay scenes is restless, for his thoughts 
are with those he loves in the far-off home. 
The Greek rests in nature and worships it; the 
Christian looks through nature to God, and 
places it beneath his feet. To the one the cross 
is foolishness ; to the other it is the power and 
wisdom of God. That culture is not Christian- 
ity, needs no proof. Its whole history is char- 



202 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

acterlzed by the absence of that moral earnest- 
ness which is the very soul of religious faith, 
and it therefore lacks an element which is the 
chief constituent of human perfection. If cul- 
ture is not Christianity, is Christianity culture; 
or is it also partial and without the power to 
create a fully-developed humanity? This is the 
charge that Arnold, while frankly confessing the 
shortcomings of culture, brings against religion, 
which, he thinks, takes a narrow view of man, 
and is destined finally to be transformed and 
governed by the Hellenic idea of beauty and of 
a human nature perfect on all its sides. His 
criticisms on this subject, which are aimed 
chiefly at the Protestant theory of Christianity, 
are sprightly and entertaining. The Pilgrim 
Fathers, he says, and their standard of perfec- 
tion are rightly judged " when we figure to our- 
selves Shakespeare or Virgil — soids in whom 
sweetness and light and all that in human nature 
is most humane were eminent — accompanying 
them on their voyage, and think what intolera- 
ble company Shakespeare and Virgil would have 
found them." 

'* And the work," he says, *' which we collec- 
tive children of God do, our grand centre of 
life, our city which we have builded for us to 
dwell in, is London ! London, with its unutter- 
able external hideousness, and with its internal 



CULTURE AND RELIGION. 203 

canker of piiblice egestas^ privatim opuientia, — 
to use the words which Sallust puts into Cato's 
mouth about Rome, — unequalled in the world! 
The word, again, which we children of God 
speak, the voice which most hits our collective 
thought, the newspaper with the largest circula- 
tion in England, nay, with the largest circulation 
in the whole world, is the Daily Telegraph ! " 
Real Protestantism, Arnold thinks, is not merely 
lacking in sweetness and light, but is positively 
hideous and grotesque ; and he remarks that 
there are things in which defect of beauty is 
defect of truth. '' Behavior," he says, " is not 
intelligible, does not account for itself to the 
mind and show the reason for its existing, unless 
it is beautiful. The same with discourse, the 
same with song, the same with worship, — all of 
them modes in which man proves his activity 
and expresses himself. To think that when one 
produces in these what is mean or vulgar or 
hideous, one can be permitted to plead that one 
has that within which passes show, it is abhor- 
rent to the nature of Hellenism to concede." 
Again: "Instead of our 'one thing needful' 
justifying in us vulgarity, hideousness, ignor- 
ance, violence, — our vulgarity, hideousness, 
ignorance violence, are really so many touch- 
stones which try our one thing needful, and 
which prove that, in the state at any rate in 



204 THINGS OF THE MIND, 

which we ourselves have it, it is not all we 
want." 

Arnold's ciilturism is not original, any more 
than Carlyle's mysticism. The one and the other 
are only English interpretations of German and 
French thought, and Arnold himself would be 
the first to acknowledge this ; nay, he has con- 
fessed as much in the following words : '* Now, 
as far as real thought is concerned, thought 
which affects the best reason and spirit of man, 
the scientific or the imaginative thought of the 
world, the only thought which deserves speaking 
of in this solemn way, America has up to the 
present time been hardly more than a province 
of England, and even now would not herself 
claim to be more than abreast of England ; and 
of this only real human thought, English thought 
itself is not just now, as we must all admit, the 
most significant factor." To get a satisfactory 
view of his position we must, therefore, pass over 
to the continent of Europe, with the understand- 
ing, however, that no attempt be made to reduce 
his views to a system. Lacordaire declared that, 
by the grace of God, he abhorred the common- 
place; and Arnold, with or without such grace, 
abhors all systems, whether mechanical, political, 
metaphysical, or theological. His chapters on 
*' The God of Metaphysics," in which by a few 
simple etymologies and with perfect gaite de 



CULTURE AND RELIGION, 205 

coeur he dissipates into thin air the profoundest 
thought of the greatest minds who have ever 
Hved, will doubtless be immortal as a curiosity 
of literature. He has no system, but he has a 
method, which is that of the modern critical 
school, which assumes as fundamental the cele- 
brated maxim of Protagoras, that " man is the 
measure of all things." The eternal, the all- 
perfect does not exist except as a mode of 
thought, which is simply the effort of the thinker 
to posit himself as an absolute principle and to 
refer all things to himself. True and fruitful 
thought consequently is not that which is in 
accord with any definite and fixed object, but 
that which moves in harmony with the stream of 
tendency and is carried upon the out-spread 
wings of the time-spirit. There is, in fact, no 
truth, but only opinions; no color, but only 
shades, and we must, therefore, abandon as 
utterly hopeless the effort to know things in 
themselves, and content ourselves with studying 
their evolutions ; throw aside metaphysics and 
psychology as the childish toys of an infantine 
race, and take up in their stead history and criti- 
cism. The characteristic mark of the true critic 
is a disinterested curiosity, and that this word has 
in English only a bad and feminine sense, Arnold 
thinks a grievance. The critic does not search 
for the truth which does not exist, but he seeks 



206 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

to supple his mind so that he may be able to 
see things on all sides, and remain an enlight- 
ened and impartial spectator of the dissolving 
views of a world which is only an eternal flux; 
and that his appreciation may be the keener, he 
becomes a part of all that he beholds. He is a 
citizen of the universe, and moves in calm indif- 
ference in all times and places, amongst all re- 
ligions and philosophies. He, however, has an 
unmistakable penchant for religious discussions, 
as though after having denied the reality of God 
and the soul he were still haunted by their phan- 
toms. He is capable, even as Renan, Ewald, 
and Arnold have shown, of a sort of poetical and 
sad devoutness, which, if it were not ridiculous, 
would be pathetic. He has no toleration for the 
unintelligent and vulgar rage against religion 
which is manifested by popular liberalism and 
atheism. When Clifford breaks out into violent 
invectives and calls Christianity an awful plague, 
Arnold in a sweet and winning tone gives him a 
gentle rebuke, though his anger is not aroused 
in this instance as it was by Bishop Wilberforce 
when he spoke of laboring for the honor and 
glory of God. " One reads it all," he says, " half 
sighing, half smiling, as the declamation of a 
clever and confident youth, with the hopeless 
inexperience, irredeemable by any cleverness of 
his age. Only when one is young and head- 



CULTURE AND RELIGION. 20/ 

strong can one thus prefer bravado to experi- 
ence, can one stand by the Sea of Time, and 
instead of listening to the solemn and rhythmical 
beat of its waves, choose to fill the air with one's 
own whoopings to start the echo." His writings, 
in fact, he takes the trouble to inform us, have 
no other object than to save the Christian relig- 
ion from its friends, who by teaching that it is 
inseparable from specific dogmas are placing it 
and themselves in fatal antagonism to the time- 
spirit and the critic, who is its prophet. In 
reality the essential thought of culturism, as 
conceived by the school from which Arnold has 
drawn his opinions, does not differ from that of 
mysticism or any of the other forms of modern 
pantheism. Its distinguishing characteristic is 
found not in its idea but in its temper. As an 
intellectual theory it is purely pantheistic. It 
regards the universe as its own final and efficient 
cause, and maintains that it is absurd to affirm 
the existence of any being distinct from the 
cosmos; and hence it teaches that God is not a 
person who knows and loves, but a " stream of 
tendency," a law, a modality ; or, to take Kenan's 
definition, the form under which we conceive the 
ideal, as space and time are the forms under 
which matter is made intelligible to us. God is 
only the category of the ideal, and when the 
German pantheists declare that man makes God, 



208 THINGS OF 7 HE MIND. 

that man creates God in thinking Him, they do 
not mean to blaspheme or to be smart, but 
merely pronounce a logical conclusion from their 
own theories. But when men who make God a 
modality, a form of thought, talk about saving 
the Bible and Christianity, we have a perfect 
right to turn away from them as solemn triflers 
in a matter which, least of all, admits of such 
proceeding. The idea then of culturism is pan- 
theistic, which is the equivalent of atheistic; and 
as atheism is the negation of religion, any attempt 
to bring about an alliance between religion and 
culture, upon the intellectual basis offered by 
the critical school, is preposterous, for the sim- 
ple reason that the hypothesis which this school 
accepts as true makes religion impossible. 
When Renan and Arnold assure us that they do 
not seek to weaken the religious sentiment but 
to purify it, we can but liken them to a physician 
who in order to purge out the humors of the 
blood should think it necessary first to destroy 
life. 

A religion of sweetness and light in a Godless 
world, which crushes beneath the iron wheel of 
fate the weak and the helpless, and has no favors 
except for the strong, is a piece of Mephistophe- 
lean irony, compared with which the pessimism 
of Schopenhauer is as soothing as the quiet 
landscape to one who flies from the feverish life 



CULTURE AND RELIGION. 209 

of the noisy crowd. Is it not enough that these 
men are persuaded that there is no God and no 
soul? Why should they come to us proclaiming 
that the earth is only a charnel-house, and in 
the same breath grow eloquent over the refresh- 
ing and refining influence which this discovery 
of theirs must have upon those who are able to 
appreciate its importance? To be just, how- 
ever, I must leave Arnold to bear alone the bur- 
den of this officious piety. One must be an 
Englishman to be able to deny God and still 
continue to preach with all the unction of a 
Methodist exhorter. Renan is consistent, and 
therefore assumes a different tone. He is abso- 
lutely without zeal or the spirit of proselytism. 
He has nothing to say of the beneficent influ- 
ence of sweetness and light; he seems rather 
disposed to think that when the whole truth is 
known existence may become unbearable; that 
the planets in which life is extinct are probably 
those in which criticism has achieved its work. 
He eschews controversy, and takes little inter- 
est in the questions which occupy the thoughts 
of men. His aims are purely speculative, and 
have no relevancy to contemporaneous events. 
He is an artist, seated on the brow of a hill, who 
sketches the landscape, but has nothing in com- 
mon with the herds that graze upon the plain 
below. He is in fact a quietist, and from the 
14 



210 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

eminence of his exceptional position surveys the 
world with a feeling akin to that which a spirit 
from some higher sphere might be supposed to 
have in contemplating the busy, fussy little ants 
that jostle one another on this mole-hill of an 
earth. God is only an idea ; nature exists, but 
is unmoral ; good and evil are alike indifferent 
to her; and history, from an ethical point of 
view, is a permanent scandal. This is the final 
word of culture as revealed by Renan, and he 
naturally enough partakes of the Buddhist tem- 
per, to which annihilation appears to be the 
supreme good. And this is doubtless the mood 
which culture, as understood by the critical 
school, tends to produce. Its intellectual prin- 
ciple is pantheism, its ethical principle is the 
identity of the good and the beautiful, and his- 
torically it evolves itself either into the animalism 
of the senses or into the quietism of a fatalistic 
philosophy; and whichever form it assumes, it 
must inevitably fail to make reason and the will 
of God prevail. 

But one may surely be a lover of culture with- 
out being forced to adopt the principles of 
Renan and Arnold, — as one may be reasonable 
and yet hold to positive beliefs ; as one may 
have taste without denying conscience. 

Culture may indeed easily become the insid- 
ious foe of revealed religion, but it may also be 



CULTURE AND RELIGION. 211 

its serviceable ally; and since in our day many 
of the most thoroughly trained and versatile 
minds are employed in the service of unbelief, 
it is certainly most desirable, and from a human 
point of view even necessary, that they be met 
by intellects of equal discipline and power. We 
are living in an epoch of transition. The decay 
of faith in the Protestant sects is accelerated by 
the consciousness that their existence is a con- 
tradiction of the fundamental principle of Prot- 
estantism; and among Catholics a wide-spread 
indifference, and new modes of thought created 
by the scientific developments of the age, have 
cooled the zeal and weakened the faith of many. 
The wavering of religious belief has unsettled 
all other things, so that nothing seems any 
longer to rest upon a firm and immovable basis. 
The new theories are in the air, and precaution- 
ary measures are ineffectual, at least with regard 
to society in general. There has never been a 
time in the world's history, in which the influ- 
ence of literature was so all-pervading as at 
present, and this power is in great measure 
anonymous and irresponsible. Reviews and 
newspapers discuss everything and are read by 
everybody, so that any youth is prepared to 
pronounce you an authoritative judgment as 
to whether there is a God. The gravest and 
most sacred subjects are treated in a mock- 



212 THINGS OF THE MIND, 

serious tone which is worse than open blas- 
phemy. The old Protestant controversy is as 
obsolete as the dress of the Pilgrim Fathers. 
Questions of grace, election, and free-will, have 
ceased to have any interest for men who, insist- 
ing upon their right of private judgment and 
the supremacy of the individual mind, are puz- 
zled to know whether God and the soul exist ; 
and the famous ministerial jousts, in which the 
doughty champions were wont to brandish their 
favorite texts like flaming swords, have lost their 
dramatic effect and are grown altogether tame 
in the eyes of a generation which hears every 
day that the Bible itself is but the fairy tale of 
an ignorant and superstitious age. The old 
disputes will doubtless survive for a time, and 
individuals and even classes may be helped by 
them, but the real issue, so far as the active 
mind of the age is concerned, has already been 
transferred to quite other grounds, and it is 
our immediate and urgent duty to fit our- 
selves for the new conflict, which is not be- 
tween the Church and the sects, but between 
the Church and infidelity. The argument is to 
be made fundamental and exhaustive. All phi- 
losophies and sciences are to be interrogated ; 
all literatures to be studied ; all forms of belief 
are to be analyzed ; all methods are to be used ; 
and the infinitely great and the infinitesimally 



CULTURE AND RELIGION, 213 

small are to be required to give up their secret. 
The religious import of the sciences is precisely 
what lends to this study its mysterious charm. 
The physical comfort which may be derived 
from a wider and truer acquaintance with nature 
is of minor importance. That which the phi- 
losopher and the man of the world are yearn- 
ing to learn from all this eager and ceaseless 
peering into the forms and workings of matter is 
whether or not any authentic response will be 
given to the eternal questionings of the human 
heart about God, the soul, and the life that is 
to be. This restlessness and scepticism is 
doubtless pathological. If men had faith, they 
would not be tormented by the feverish anxiety 
to surprise God in the mysteries which he has 
hidden from human eye; but they have no 
faith, and since it is impossible for the mind to 
remain indifferent to the infinite mystery which 
is everywhere in all that it sees and thinks, 
therefore do men who have ceased to believe 
seek to satisfy by knowledge the inborn craving 
of the soul for some tidings from the inner truth 
of things. They will take nothing for granted, 
but make God himself questionable. And here 
at once we may perceive the arduousness of 
the task which is imposed upon those who are 
called to the defence of the faith in our day. 
The first step their adversaries take leads into 



214 THINGS OF 7 HE MIND. 

the bottomless abyss of endless speculation and 
doubt. In the Protestant controversy there was 
the common and certain ground of the Written 
Word, to which in the confusion of debate it 
was possible to return to take bearings, while 
the deists of the last century agreed with their 
opponents in admitting the existence of God as 
indisputably evident to the natural reason. But 
the new phase of infidelity would make knowl- 
edge itself inconclusive in all matters where our 
concern is with the absolute truth of things. It 
denies that there is any such truth, or at least 
that it is discoverable by man. I find in all 
the current theories of unbelief the assumption 
that all that can be known is the relative, and 
that the highest conceivable philosophy is only 
phenomenology. With men who hold such 
opinions it is impossible to reason from fixed 
principles. The old methods fail to reach them. 
All the syllogisms that can be strung together 
can never compass a higher truth than that 
which is given in the original intuition, and if 
this does not attain to the reality underlying 
the phenomenon neither will our conclusions. 
The assumption that knowledge is only the per- 
ception of relations makes all discussions as to 
what anything is in itself appear futile and 
childish. Hence the contempt of the modern 
schools for metaphysics and the scholastic 



CULTURE AND RELIGION. 215 

methods. The great practical difficulty, as I 
take it, in successfully controverting the new 
theories lies in the fact that they represent 
modes of viewing things rather than states of 
mind. They are not held as conclusions from 
unanswerable arguments, but as a way of ac- 
counting for phenomena which is justified by 
the convergence of innumerable plausibilities 
toward a given line of thought. It is consid- 
ered to be enough that they are in accord with 
the tendencies of the age, and in harmony with 
the great time-spirit, who, as these philosophers 
teach, has usurped the throne of the Eternal 
and Omnipotent God. A few words will suffice 
to sketch in general outhne this system, and at 
the same time to show how widely it prevails. 
It is assumed that God is not or cannot be 
known to be, and as philosophy is phenome- 
nology, it starts with matter in the state in which 
it is possible for the mind first to detect it. 
Space is filled with incandescent gas, star-dust, 
from which the sidereal systems are evolved. 
This view, for the correctness of which many 
arguments are adduced, receives additional 
weight from the study of our own planet, which, 
beginning as an incandescent mass, has during 
long ages been gradually cooling. When life 
first appears it is in its lowest forms, and there 
is progression up to man. To this point it is 



2l6 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

maintained the astronomer and the geologist are 
able to conduct us. The zoologist now comes 
to trace the descent of man, as the geologist has 
followed the evolution of the globe, and Darwin 
and others find that he has been developed by 
natural processes from the lowest forms of life. 
The question of man's special endowments thus 
presents itself, and the psychologist attempts to 
show that thought is transformed sensation, and 
will, transformed emotion, as man is a trans- 
formed animal. 

The principle of evolution is applied to the 
history of language and of races in philology 
and ethnology, and these sciences are made 
auxiliary to the new theories. The sociologist 
next appears, to unravel the infinitely compli- 
cated and intricate network of human relations, 
and to point out how this marvellous and entan- 
gled scheme is but the product of a few rudi- 
mentary instincts. And finally, the philosopher 
of history proposes to account for the whole 
life and all the achievements of the human race 
by the aid of fatalistic laws. Given the race, 
and its surroundings, and he will offer you a 
mechanical rule by which you will be able 
to explain everything, — religion, literature, 
and social institutions. It would, of course, 
be beside my present purpose to stop to point 
out the absurdities and the gaps in all this, but 



CULTURE AND RELIGION. 21/ 

what I wish to call attention to is the fact that 
this is a way of looking at the universe, and that 
little or nothing is gained by insisting upon 
errors in detail or by showing that certain data 
of science are in accord with revealed truth. 
The fault is radical and universal, and the only 
effective method of dealing with it is to be 
sought irf a comprehensive philosophy, which, 
starting from a true theory of knowledge will 
embrace the whole range of science, and by 
correcting the false interpretations of its data, 
will educate men and lead them to see that a 
theory of the universe which excludes God is 
not only unintelligible, but destructive of the 
essential principles of reason. The intellectual 
difficulties with which the present generation of 
believers have to contend are greater than in 
any past age. It is not possible to laugh at 
our adversaries unless we are content to make 
ourselves ridiculous. In matters of this kind 
sarcasm and vituperation are not only out of 
place, but are no better than the language of 
the devil. Smart hits intended for the crowd 
fail of effect even with the masses. 

That in the end, and after never so much 
science and theory, the perfect wisdom of hum- 
ble and trusting faith will be made only the 
more evident is in no way doubtful ; but in the 
meantime we may not stand as idle lookers-on, 



2l8 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

and as though we had no part or concern in this 
mighty and painful conflict. 

It was a principle with St. Ignatius of Loyola 
that a Christian should have the faith which 
hopes everything from God, and then act as 
though he expected nothing except from his 
own exertions. 

No maxim could be more applicable to the 
emergency of which I am writing. I know that 
our blessed Lord is with his Church, and that 
he can turn our ignorance and supineness to 
the good of those who love him. I know that 
whatever we may do we are useless servants. 
The prayer of the humble is better than the 
thoughts of the learned, and a great saint is 
able to do a holier work than the most perfectly 
cultivated genius. 

All this is indisputable, and one benefit to 
be hoped for from a higher culture would be 
the power to realize more truly what we are 
so ready to admit in theory. My words, if 
addressed to those devout and saintly souls 
who with unutterable groanings raise to God the 
voice of prayer which penetrates the heavens, 
would be an impertinence. It may well be that. 
were it not for these just ones we should all 
perish. My thought is lower and is intended 
for those who, in the midst of a thousand imper- 
fections, feel that they are better fitted to fight 



CULTURE AND RELIGION. 219 

in the plain below than to lift up hands of 
supplication on the holy mount. 

The issue indeed is in God's keeping, but we 
must strive to quit ourselves like men, and as 
though all depended upon our skill and courage. 
Without thorough training and mental discipline 
we shall only cumber the ground and block the 
way. 



CHAPTER VII. 

PATRIOTISM. 

And Thou, O God, of whom we hold 

Our country and our Freedom fair, 
Within Thy tender love enfold 

This land ; for all Thy people care. 
Uplift our hearts above our fortunes high, 

Let not the good we have make us forget 
The better things that in Thy heavens lie ! 

Keep, still, amid the fever and the fret 
Of all this eager life, our thoughts on Thee, 

The Hope, the Strength, the God of all the Free. 

LOVE of country springs from so many 
sources which have their fountain-head 
in our inmost being that it scarcely needs com- 
mending; and it has found such abundant and 
varied expression in the art and hterature of 
all nations that it is difficult to praise it without 
falling into commonplace. Each one seems to 
himself, if he go not beyond primitive, unreflect- 
ing consciousness, a separate, independent being, 
whose thought, love, and deeds are determined 
simply by his own personality. A little atten- 
tion, however, will show him that whatever he 
sees, knows, and feels is part of himself. As 



PATRIOTISM, 221 

his body is kept living by the constant assimila- 
tion of food and air, so his mind and heart are 
kept alive and active through communion with 
what may be perceived and understood, or ad- 
mired and loved. The ties which bind us to earth 
and heaven, to air and water, the sympathies 
which unite us with whatever is beautiful, true, or 
good, the attractions which draw us to beings like 
and yet unlike ourselves, are but forms of self- 
love. We find and love in what is not ourselves 
that which we need to round and complete our 
lives. The desire to grow toward and into all 
things is the divine spark in our nature, the 
impulse which makes us yearn for more know- 
ledge, more love, more happiness, more posses- 
sions. We tend ultimately to identify ourselves 
with God and His universe and the objects and 
persons we learn to know and love are the step- 
ping-stones in the ascent toward the divine life. 
The instinct for local and personal attachments is 
born in us ; it is found in the mere animal, — the 
horse knows his stall, the dog loves his master. 
Our fondness for things and persons is not wholly 
determined by their qualities. The cottage of 
the poor is cherished more than the palace of the 
rich ; the most helpless child is often a mother's 
darling. Bleak and cheerless Lapland is loved 
as truly as Italy, dowered with beauty's fatal gift. 
The spot where our young years were passed, 



222 THINGS OF THE MIND, 

as in a dream, the persons by whom we were 
then surrounded, seem fair and good to us. 
The memory of them is intertwined with all our 
thoughts ; they are part of ourselves. The very 
sorrows we knew with them are sweeter than 
the joys we now can taste. Our souls never lose 
the tinge of the colors with which they were 
then imbued. We bear with us into distant 
lands, through long years, the memories of that 
dewy dawn, of that fresh springtime when all 
things seemed created anew and a smile of God 
rested upon His world. With the love of home 
and of those who made it home, the love of 
country first begins to stir within the heart ; for 
our country is and remains our fatherland, the 
land where we knew a father's and a mother's 
love. This is the meaning of the Greek word 
'' patriotism ; " it is the love of the fathers ; of 
their thoughts and hopes; of their deeds and 
aspirations. It is therefore something far higher 
and deeper than a mere attachment to places, 
though fair and pleasant they be. Our sympathy 
with nature, however, is very real. We feel a 
kinship with stars and flowers ; we are uplifted 
by mountains; we are awed by the ocean; we 
are fresh and happy with spring; we are sober 
and subdued with autumn ; and this general feel- 
ing becomes tenderer and more human when it 
is associated with what is dear to us for reasons 



PATRIOTISM. 223 

personal to ourselves. In this way the scenery in 
which our home is set, by which our country is 
characterized, touches us more nearly, awakens 
more grateful and delightful thoughts than aught 
we can behold elsewhere. If we are moulded 
by our surroundings we also help to create them, 
and objects which for years we have been accus- 
tomed to look upon day by day have for us a 
meaning and a sacredness, a charm and a beauty 
which they lose when viewed by the indifferent 
eyes of strangers. Thus the physical features 
of the fatherland, whether noble or common, 
impress the imagination and color the souls of 
the children ; they enter into our patriotic feel- 
ings, as the face, the voice, the gestures of one we 
love seem to become part of our love. When 
the German remembers the Rhine, with its vine- 
clad hills and feudal castles, his heart thrills 
with emotion for the whole German land. The 
Irishman who turns to Erin feels his pulse beat 
quicker when he thinks of the glories of Wicklow 
and Killarney. And so all men are pleased 
with the natural excellences and beauties of their 
country; the fertility of its soil, the salubrity 
and temperateness of its climate, its high moun- 
tains, its deep valleys, its mighty rivers, its bays 
and inlets, its islands and solemn woods, its water- 
falls, casting their white incense to heaven, — all 
help to make it precious and dear ; and it becomes 



224 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

Still dearer when genius or heroism has thrown 
its light upon nature's charms. Monuments 
like the Cathedral of Cologne, or Westminster 
Abbey, or St. Peter's in Rome, are centres of 
patriotic feeling. The emigrant to far lands 
thinks of them with a sentiment akin to that of 
the Israelite in captivity: "By the waters of 
Babylon we sat down and wept, when we re- 
membered thee, O Sion ! " " If I forget thee, 
O Jerusalem ! let my right hand forget her 
cunning." The ruins of what our forefathers 
built, the battlefields whereon they shed their 
blood for right and freedom, the graves where 
their bones are buried make sacred the land. But 
these local attachments and associations, sweet 
and holy though they are, and inseparable from 
right feeling are not of the essence of patriotism ; 
for our true human world is spiritual, not mate- 
rial ; the city of the soul, and not that in which 
the body tabernacles, is our country. 

When in some foreign land we hear the sacred 
name spoken, in the old familiar mother-tongue, 
and our pulse quickens, and our eye brightens, 
and our bosom heaves, and the speaker — whom 
perchance we have never seen before — seems 
to be our brother, our emotion is caused by 
something higher and purer than local attach- 
ments and memories. We live in the spirit or 
not at all ; and the material things we possess 



PATRIOTISM. 225 

or Strive for seem good to us because we believe 
they are serviceable to the higher life of thought 
and love. A sentiment in common, a deep, far 
pervading feeling that animates a collective body- 
as with one soul, is what makes a national con- 
sciousness. Fertile fields may be made waste, 
cities desolate, rivers dry ; the ruins of the homes 
of our youth may be trodden by the hoofs of 
beasts, friends may turn from us, and civil strife 
rend the land, but the love of country still burns 
with its steady, inextinguishable glow within 
our hearts. We love the fatherland, not alone 
or chiefly for the food it gives, the property it 
protects, the security it provides; we love it 
above all for the richer, freer, nobler human 
life which it makes possible: not so much for 
its high mountains, its wide-spreading plains, 
its broad rivers, its thundering cataracts, its 
pleasant and bracing air, as for the noble 
freedom, the generous love, the great thoughts 
which enter into and determine the national 
spirit and character. Our country is the symbol 
of all that is most priceless on earth, — liberty, 
truth, devotion, loyalty. Its name is intertwined 
with the memories, hopes, loves, and aspirations 
of all our life ; it is as dear to us as that of our 
mother, as full of sweet suggestiveness as that of 
home, as near to our hearts as the names of the 
friends we most love. At its invocation our whole 
15 



226 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

nature changes: if timid, we become brave; if 
hard, sympathetic ; if selfish, generous. We 
turn from wealth and pleasant company and the 
most cherished pursuits if that sacred name 
ring out in the bugle call, and, throwing all things 
away, we rush forward to defy danger and death 
that we may save our country's honor and inde- 
pendence. **It is a pleasant and a glorious thing," 
says Horace, *' to die for one's country;" and no 
line of ancient poetry has evoked a more uni- 
versal response. Whatever else may change or 
wholly pass away, patriotism is as imperishable 
as religion, as immortal as love ; for to all well- 
born hearts the native land is forever dear, 
whether strong and free or helpless and in chains. 
The memory of its glories and triumphs descends 
through a hundred generations, and when the 
people itself perishes, the deeds of its heroes 
become the property of the whole race of man. 
Through a thousand years of suffering and sor- 
row, of tyranny and oppression, the heavenly 
passion still lives, and from out the gloom, the 
lovers of their country look to God, waiting in 
hope, till the dawn of a better day shall break, 
bringing promise of freedom and new life. 

What land, what people, has the sun ever illu- 
mined more worthy of the heart's deep affection 
than our own? Here, where Nature, who never 
hastens and never tires, has stored, through 



PATRIOTISM. 227 

countless ages, whatever may be serviceable to 
man, divine Providence has given us a country 
as large as all Europe, with a soil more fertile, 
and a climate more invigorating. We have come 
into possession of it, not as ignorant and lawless 
barbarians, but as civilized men, with conscious 
purposes, with high ideals, the inheritors of all 
the knowledge and wisdom of the past, and hav- 
ing in our hands whatever implements and weap- 
ons human skill has invented to strengthen and 
enlarge the power of man. Across the great 
ocean our ancestors bore the blessings of Chris- 
tian civilization, leaving behind them the narrow- 
ness and hatreds, the political and social wrongs 
with which it had become associated. Never 
did a continent pass under the control of a new 
race with so little injustice, so little violence and 
cruelty ; never were states founded by men more 
true-hearted, honest, and brave ; never were great 
and memorable triumphs gained by fairer means ; 
never was a commonwealth made to rest on broad- 
er or more humane principles. 

It is the planting of the American colonies 
which makes the discovery of Columbus the 
opening of a new era In the history of man- 
kind. Here the Christian people saw the light 
dawn toward which through a thousand years 
of darkness and struggle they had been grop- 
ing. Here God's infinite goodness revealed 



228 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

itself, offering opportunities for freer and nobler 
life to all alike, without distinction of race or creed 
or sex, even as upon all His sun shines and His 
rain falls. The patriots who made the Declara- 
tion of Independence, the statesmen and warriors 
who led the people through the long and doubt- 
ful struggle of the Revolution, felt that they were 
building better than they knew. Never were 
heroes more conscious that the cause they bat- 
tled for was God's and all men's. In their words, 
and in their deeds there breathes a lofty and 
unselfish spirit, which, to the end of time, shall 
thrill every true and generous heart. Their 
work has prospered beyond the utmost vision of 
seers, beyond the fondest dreams of poets. The 
little republic they founded has grown, in a cen- 
tury, to be the strongest, the most progressive, 
the most enlightened, and the most firmly estab- 
lished civil power in the world. In virtue of its 
constitutional vitality and assimilative force, it 
has spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from 
the Canadian border to the everglades of Florida. 
Decade after decade it has sent farther and far- 
ther west colonists who, as by a kind of instinct, 
became the founders of prosperous states. The 
great Civil War, which threatened to disrupt it, but 
purified its constitution and opened to it a larger 
and less impeded career. In the old world who- 
ever is straitened or oppressed, whoever yearns 



PATRIOTISM. 229 

for richer life and wider opportunities, turns with 
longing to America. However much we may 
lack, as individuals, the culture and breeding, the 
repose and dignity of manner which distinguish 
the true gentleman or the perfect lady, as a 
people we are the most attractive ; and the charm 
of our national life lies not so much in our free- 
dom, or in anything we have already accom- 
plished, as in the promise it gives of nobler things. 
Here the largest thought and the widest love 
which have ever been brought to bear upon the 
polities of men are at work to mould the coming 
race. Here is liberty; here is good will; here 
is willingness ; here is invitation to all ; here 
is opportunity, beckoning to every faculty of the 
human soul. " Never," says Emerson, " never 
country had such a fortune, as men call fortune, 
as this, in its geography, its history, and in its 
majestic possibilities." But let not our patriotism 
run to foolish vanity; let us not imagine because 
our country is great we also are great; let us 
rather dread lest in a noble land we ourselves be 
found ignorant and vulgar. The wise are never 
boastful, and they who best understand the price- 
less worth of America feel how far above them 
is the ideal of public and private virtue of which 
America is the symbol. He is the truest patriot 
who strives day by day to make himself worthy 
of such a country, turning away from no labor, 



230 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

no hardship, no self-denial, which may help him 
to become an honest, honorable, enlightened, a .d 
religious man. Who is there among us who 
would not be willing to die for his country? 
Let us learn that to live for it is a yet higher 
and more useful thing ; that the task it sets each 
one of us is not in any way beneath a hero's 
courage, a philosopher's insight, or a poet's love. 
Weath and numbers we have, and all the strength 
which material civilization can give. What we 
lack is a new man to represent fitly this new 
world. Great things must be balanced by great 
characters, or matter will prevail over spirit, and 
the soul become inferior to its setting. ** It is 
certain," says Emerson again, *' that our civiliza- 
tion is yet incomplete; it has not ended nor 
given sign of ending in a hero. It is a wild 
democracy, — the riot of mediocrities, dishones- 
ties, and fudges." 

The special vice of the American is the breath- 
less haste with which he works for success, which 
he generally takes to mean money. Whatever 
is restful, as reflection and meditation, gives him 
qualms of conscience ; he is ashamed to be at 
leisure. He thinks, watch in hand, as he eats, 
with his eye on the daily market-report. He 
seems always afraid lest he forget or neglect 
something, and so miss an opportunity to 
gain a dollar. This workingman's haste, this 



PATRIOTISM, 231 

alertness for a chance to turn a penny, is 
fatal to distinction of thought and behavior; 
it destroys the sense for form, for proportion, 
and grace. Hence this type of American, 
in all the relations of life, is quick, sharp, and 
abrupt. In his intercourse with friends and 
relations, with women and children, he is pre- 
occupied by thoughts of business, and seems 
to say: "Appreciate my politeness, for time is 
money." His natural inclination is to marry a 
wife with as little ceremony as he buys a horse. 
Joyful occasions are almost as unwelcome to him 
as the sad, for both alike are interruptions of 
business. If he is poor he works with the 
hope of becoming rich; if he is rich he works 
from dread of poverty. He cannot take recre- 
ation without apology, as though he should 
say, ''I beg pardon, but my health or my 
wife's requires this of me. " He writes a letter in 
the style of a telegram, and would prefer to talk 
only through a telephone from fear of being but- 
ton-holed. He looks forward to the time when 
he shall travel a hundred instead of fifty miles 
an hour; and in his rapid journeys he is all the 
while thinking or talking of business or politics, 
which for him is mainly a question of finance. 
The men in whom he takes interest are money 
men and politicians. In his spare moments he 
reads the newspapers, which are filled with 



232 THINGS OF THE MIND. 

whatever concerns trade and material progress, 
interspersed with accounts of all kinds of crime. 
His idea of pleasure is sport. He admires a horse 
more for the price it brings than for beauty and 
grace; a pugilist more for the money than the 
victory he wins. He measures all things by the 
same standard. A book, a preacher, a play, like 
a mine or a railway, are worth what they will 
sell for in the market What is dear is fine, and 
he will even submit to all sorts of discomfort if 
it is expensive. A poet is an idle, foolish being, 
for poetry, unless some freak of fashion give it 
value, is unsalable. Dancing is a good enough 
pursuit, if one knows how to make it lucrative. 
He easily breaks forth into abuse of the very 
rich, for it is natural to abuse one's more suc- 
cessful rivals. 

The gospel of work and utility has been 
preached to us and imposed on us, until we all 
have become or are in danger of becoming the 
drudges and victims of the uneasy and insatiable 
demon of greed. The ideal is the possession of 
more and more, and in striving for this we for- 
get and lose ourselves, — lose even the power to 
enjoy the wealth for which we sacrificed all that 
makes life good and pleasant. To add to the 
trouble, we seem no longer to be free. We lack 
self-control, and are borne onward by this mate- 
rial movement, as the crest is carried by the 



PATRIOTISM. 233 

wave. We have lost relish for a life which is 
simple, pure, moderate, and healthful. We are 
the victims of an environment, and to survive at 
all, we feel we must survive as money-getters. 
That the majority now believe in this Mammon- 
worship is no proof that it is not a degrading 
and idolatrous worship. *' The majority are 
bad," said one of the wise men of Greece; we 
at least may say that they are unthinking and 
heedless of the best. They need the guidance 
and the strength which are found in the wisdom 
and example of the few ; but we hitch our most 
gifted men to the drays of commerce and the 
machinery of manufacture, where they are goaded 
on, and driven to death by the tyranny of com- 
petition. They should be treated like coursers, 
which for the most part are idle, nursing the 
strength that renders them capable of memora- 
ble deeds. We boast of our industrial captains, 
who stand at the head of great material enter- 
prises, not perceiving that their work, like that 
of the unhappy beings they employ, prevents 
them from becoming men; for, however many 
millions of money they may have, they have low 
thoughts and feeble faith and love. If we love 
our country, let us not be afraid to speak even 
unpleasant truth in this age when it has grown 
to be the fashion to lie to the people, as formerly 
men lied to kings. 



234 THINGS OF THE MTND. 

There is no better measure of the progress of 
an individual than the degree of his abiHty to 
stand alone, in thought and action, undisturbed 
by the adverse opinions and judgments of his 
fellow-men. He who leads his own life is a real, 
not an artificial, man. Let us believe in the 
worth of character, and while we strive to up- 
build our own, let us also seek to spread this 
faith, which is fundamental for all who would 
uphold popular government. When the people 
are a herd they are easily swayed and ruled by 
one man; when they are individualized, the 
dominion of one is not possible. Let us hold 
and teach that better than millions of money or 
cattle, is a brave heart, a hopeful temper, an 
enlightened mind, a cheerful and appreciative 
soul, content in quiet virtue, and able to take 
delight in famihar things and in the common 
blessings which God sends to all. 

Let us dread whatever is hard or exaggerated 
or vulgar ; whatever shows lack of delicacy of 
thought or purity of conduct ; whatever springs 
from a spirit of false audacity or foolish boast- 
fulness. Let our patriotism be a sort of religion, 
urging us to elevation, seriousness, and chastity 
of thought and desire; for, after all, our confi- 
dence that popular government is the best rests 
on faith, not on knowledge. Let us make our- 
selves wise and helpful, strong and self-contained, 



PATRIOTISM. 235 

whether we are happy or unhappy. What gives 
pleasure is of little moment; what gives power 
and wisdom is all-important. Let us make true 
Emerson's prophecy : "Trade and government 
will not alone be the favored aims, but every 
useful, every elegant art, every exercise of imagi- 
nation, the height of reason, the noblest affection, 
the purest religion will find their home in our 
institutions, and write our laws for the benefit 
of men." 



THE END. 



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